Technical / Research - Page 6

Plasic Logic has unveiled a new flexible e-paper prototype display. The new plastic-based display features 4,000 colors at 75 ppi. It's quite large (they say it's almost A4 in size) It is made from over 1.2 million plastic-based transistors. It can be bent without distorting the image. We're not sure how close the company is to actually produce such panels. We assume that the new display is E Ink based, but we're not sure.

Seiko Epson announced a new SoC aimed towards e-paper applications, the S1D13M01. The new chip integrates an MIPS-24Kef CPU core and also includes Epson's multi-pipeline e-paper display controller, which has been optimized for E Ink display panels. The new SoC was jointly co-developed with Taiwanese Magic Pixel.

The S1D13M01 has a hardware JPEG engine, PNG decoder engine, color space conversion engine and 2D graphics engine. The S1D13M01 is also designed to realize low cost, low power consumption e-paper applications by optimizing the e-paper application system.

LG Display announced today that it has started to produce 6" E Ink panels on a plastic substrate for a Chinese based ODM, which will release its e-reader product next month in Europe. The panel features XGA (1024x768) resolution and is only 0.7 mm thick and weighs just 14 grams - half the weight of a glass based E Ink panel.

The display is bendable, but it's not clear whether the actual device will offer a bendable screen, it may just be curved. Another big advantage of this display is that it's unbreakable. We'll have to wait till the actual product is announced to know more details. Here's a video released in October showing LG's curved plastic based E Ink panel:

According to Samsung LCD Netherlands R&D Center (SNRC)’s Johan Feenstra, Samsung is set to start producing Electrowetting displays in 2013. The new panels will features color and fast refresh rates. According to Samsung, these new panels will be much more efficient than E Ink, too. Samsung is currently focusing on 9.7" prototypes.

Here's a chart provided by Samsung showing how much more efficient the new technology is compared to E Ink:

E Ink released three nice videos of its FPD-2011 booth: showing the new E Ink displays, panels and applications:

AUO is showing a new prototype that integrates a flexible e-paper display with a flexible PV and battery. They call this an "unplugged flexible e-paper display". The display is 6" in size and offers 800x600 resolution, and is based on organic TFTs.

The PV battery is based on amorphous silicon and weights just 10 grams. With 1.5AM (air mass) solar light, it generates 1W or more of electricity (it offers conversion efficiency of about 3.6% or higher).

Samsung is showing a new 9.7" XGA resolution Electrowetting display prototype. We don't have any information yet beside this photo:

Bookeen has been researching high speed E Ink displays for over two years, and now they have unveiled the technology - which they call High Speed Ink System technology or (HSIS). Basically, HSIS is an E Ink Pearl touch display, a TI Cortex A8 processor (which Bookeen said was developed in partnership with TI) and optimized software and algorithms developed by Bookeen.

Bookeen recently announced the Odyssey e-reader that includes all HSIS components - and is capable of fast page refreshes, video, scrollable menus and scrollable web-browser and more - all this on a monochrome 6" E Ink pearl display of course. Bookeen has been showing prototype HSIS devices since early 2011.

Here's a nice short video showing a 6" E Ink Pearl panel running on the Freescale i.MX50 EVK, showing the quick refresh rate possible with such a setup:

Taiwan's ITRI developed a new technology called i2R e-paper. It's a 're-writable' paper. The idea is that the image on the paper does not change - until you pass it through a special thermal printer which can then change the image - but only about 260 times or so. The i2R uses heat-activated liquid crystals and can achieve up to 300dpi (monochrome).