7-segment Display

An LED or Light Emitting Diode, is a solid state optical pn-junction diode which emits light energy in the form of photons.

The emission of these photons occurs when the diode junction is forward biased by an external voltage allowing current to flow across its junction, and in Electronics we call this process electroluminescence.

The actual colour of the visible light emitted by an LED, ranging from blue to red to orange, is decided by the spectral wavelength of the emitted light which itself is dependent upon the mixture of the various impurities added to the semiconductor materials used to produce it.

Light emitting diodes have many advantages over traditional bulbs and lamps, with the main ones being their small size, long life, various colours, cheapness and are readily available, as well as being easy to interface with various other electronic components and digital circuits.

But the main advantage of light emitting diodes is that because of their small die size, several of them can be connected together within one small and compact package producing what is generally called a 7-segment Display.

The 7-segment display, also written as “seven segment display”, consists of seven LEDs (hence its name) arranged in a rectangular fashion as shown. Each of the seven LEDs is called a segment because when illuminated the segment forms part of a numerical digit (both Decimal and Hex) to be displayed. An additional 8th LED is sometimes used within the same package thus allowing the indication of a decimal point, (DP) when two or more 7-segment displays are connected together to display numbers greater than ten.

Each one of the seven LEDs in the display is given a positional segment with one of its connection pins being brought straight out of the rectangular plastic package. These individually LED pins are labelled from a through to g representing each individual LED. The other LED pins are connected together and wired to form a common pin.

So by forward biasing the appropriate pins of the LED segments in a particular order, some segments will be light and others will be dark allowing the desired character pattern of the number to be generated on the display. This then allows us to display each of the ten decimal digits 0 through to 9 on the same 7-segment display.

The displays common pin is generally used to identify which type of 7-segment display it is. As each LED has two connecting pins, one called the “Anode” and the other called the “Cathode”, there are therefore two types of LED 7-segment display called: Common Cathode (CC) and Common Anode (CA).