What is the purpose of the NO CHIP pin on a 7 segment display?

[phlegmy]

7 seg display NO CHIP pin??

hello wise ones.
I've recently taken delivery of some 7 segment led displays
for a small project, (i'm brand new at building electronic ccts)
3 of theese single digit displays will be driven from a microcontroller

the 7 segment display units have a pin labelled "no chip"
from googling all i can figure out is that it likely to be a "no chip select pin"

i will experiment of course to figure this out but forewarned is fore armed!

can i use the "no chip" pin to strobe the displays?
i had planned on using some small transistors to
connect the common cathode of each digit, to ground ,in turn.
this would achive the strobing, but is there some way to make use of this
"no chip pin"?

Any insights appreciated

 

[vk6kro]

"NO CHIP" doesn't really make sense. Could it be a NC pin, meaning "NO CONNECTION" ?

Have a look at this page:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&...&gbv=2&aq=3&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=7+segment+display

which gives a lot of pinouts for 7 segment displays and how to connect them.

None of them seem to have a NC pin, but it is very common to have a pin like this on an integrated circuit. It just means you should not use this pin for anything as it may have an internal connection that is not part of the output of the chip, or it may just go nowhere.

 

[phlegmy]

I know its been a while, but for the sake of anyone else who gets here, the "no chip" pin seems to have been a dummy, i simply clipped it off before soldering the displays to my circuit.

 

[Jiggy-Ninja]

"NO CHIP" doesn't really make sense. Could it be a NC pin, meaning "NO CONNECTION" ?

Have a look at this page:
http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&...&gbv=2&aq=3&aqi=g10&aql=&oq=7+segment+display

which gives a lot of pinouts for 7 segment displays and how to connect them.

None of them seem to have a NC pin, but it is very common to have a pin like this on an integrated circuit. It just means you should not use this pin for anything as it may have an internal connection that is not part of the output of the chip, or it may just go nowhere.

I think MAN72 displays (or something like that) that have 14 pins have a few NC pins. The ones I got from school have a gap where the NC pin would be.