Head drivers

Advanced Silicon has developed a mixed low/high-voltage head driver ASIC for ink-jet printers.

The ASIJP1001A is able to independently drive two print heads (black & white and color cartridges). It includes two switched regulator controllers and a linear regulator that generate the supply voltages for each head, and auxiliary HV supply voltage for head logic control. Analog information from various sensors is read through a programmable gain amplifier and a multi-channel analog-to-digital converter (ADC). Analog (on-chip reference voltage, current and frequency) and digital (GPIOs, interrupt, reset control) service blocks are also included.

The IC is mounted on the carriage board of an inkjet printer and communicates with the main processor located on the motherboard through a flat cable consisting of a high-speed dual-channel LVDS interface, a low-speed standard SPI interface and several direct inputs.