Driving controller, display device and driving method thereof

A driving controller comprising:

• a compensation unit configured to receive an image signal corresponding to a first display area and a second display area, to calculate stress data based on the image signal and previous stress data, and to output an image data signal, which is obtained by compensating for the image signal based on the stress data;
• a memory configured to store the stress data of a previous frame from the compensation unit as the previous stress data and to provide the previous stress data to the compensation unit;
• and
• a multi-frequency compensation unit configured to:
• receive a data enable signal;
• when the data enable signal indicates a multi-frequency mode, count a number of consecutive masking enable frames;
• calculate accumulated second stress data based on the number of the consecutive masking enable frames and second stress data, which corresponds to the second display area, from among the stress data from the memory;
• and
• store the accumulated second stress data in the memory,
• wherein the multi-frequency mode includes full driving frames and masking enable frames,
• wherein the multi-frequency compensation unit determines whether a current frame corresponds to one of the full driving frames and the masking enable frames, based on the data enable signal,
• wherein, in the multi-frequency mode, the first display area is driven at a first operating frequency, and the second display area is driven at a second operating frequency different from the first operating frequency.

A driving method of a display device, the method comprising:

• receiving an image signal corresponding to a first display area and a second display area and receiving previous stress data from a memory;
• calculating stress data based on the image signal and the previous stress data and compensating for the image signal based on the stress data;
• outputting an image data signal obtained by compensating for the image signal based on the stress data, and storing the stress data in the memory;
• receiving a control signal and determining whether a current frame is a masking enable frame of a multi-frequency mode, based on the control signal;
• when the current frame is the masking enable frame of the multi-frequency mode, counting a number of consecutive masking enable frames;
• and
• calculating accumulated second stress data based on the number of the consecutive masking enable frames and second stress data corresponding to the second display area among the stress data stored in the memory and storing the accumulated second stress data in the memory.