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greentechZONE Products for the week of April 21, 2008
Epson Electronics America Inc. Says…
Breakthrough Controller IC for Electronic Paper Displays
Chip enables faster navigation, multi-tasking, and real-time pen/keyboard input
Seiko Epson Corporation, its subsidiary Epson Electronics America Inc., and E Ink have announced a jointly developed display controller IC enabling new capabilities for E Ink’s Vizplex enabled electronic paper displays. EPD low-power consumption screen technology is driving an emerging class of new mobile applications, such as eBooks, eNewspapers, tablet PCs, laptop secondary displays, eNotebooks, and eDictionaries.
The new EPD controller IC (part number S1D13521B) was developed by combining technologies from both Epson and E Ink. It will be offered in production quantities by Epson and as part of E Ink’s upcoming AM300 Broadsheet prototype kit.
The Epson display controller will bring greater functionality to EPDs using E Ink technology by speeding up the user interface via seamless navigation, drop down/popup menus, responsive cursors and real-time keyboard entry. The controller enables the display to perform up to 16 tasks in parallel, and supports smooth and responsive pen input devices for annotations and sketches.
“Epson developed the powerful S1D13521 with E Ink to support new ePaper applications such as electronic newspapers, portable web browsers and industrial tablets,” said Russ Wilcox, President and CEO of E Ink. “With the ability to address many screen regions simultaneously, future devices using this chip could offer a fast menu interface, simple animations, higher grayscale levels, and user input through typing and touch.”
“Epson has, for many years, been offering various display controllers to the market. With this new controller IC, we are very excited to develop the emerging EPD display market together with E Ink. This new product development reflects our shared commitment to developing electronic solutions that help to conserve energy and natural resources and are friendly to the environment,” said Ryuhei Miyagawa, Division Manager for Epson’s Semiconductor Operations Division.
Epson’s controller IC’s functionality is fully enabled when integrated into a display solution utilizing a host controller, tuned waveforms, and E Ink’s Vizplex-enabled active matrix electrophoretic displays. Its ability to perform regional updates contributes to a more responsive screen for both input and output usage.
EN-Genius Says…
Epson’s S1D13521B electronic paper display driver chip is a nicely-conceived device that helps overcome most of the slower response times and complex drive requirements from which today’s early electronic paper technologies suffer (A short explanation of EPD – electronic paper display – is included in this review). By making it easy to get lower-latency, higher-resolution text and better graphics from the somewhat tricky characteristics of today’s EPDs, the Epson EPD controller and the slick little development kit that is supports will help accelerate the technology’s market acceptance as an eco-friendly alternative to cutting down, processing and transporting some of the millions of tons of trees we use for books, magazines catalogs, forms, and technical literature each year.
Like most of today’s EPD controllers, the S1D13521B takes the guesswork out of setting each e-paper pixel to the right state by automatically selecting the correct waveform (based on the required transition and temperature) to pass to the analog driver chip that supplies the actual ±15V to the rows and columns that activate the display. The big advantage that Epson offers is that it drives the EPD in such a way as to make it much more responsive from the end user point of view. It cannot accelerate the process of positioning the ink particles within the display (a task that can take 200 - 750 ms), but it allows multiple areas of the screen to be updated concurrently without having to wait for an earlier update to complete. This allows the controller to support multiple operations such as cursor movements, pen position updates, and page section updates with a new operation beginning every 20 ms. Its ability to cache pre-rendered pop-up windows and menus also helps cut down on processing time and latency.
A smart UI designer should be able to take good advantage of all these smart features to mask the display’s latency and allow the screen to track pen inputs more closely and accurately. Improving the apparent response rate of the screen, allowing a touch screen to collect faster, more accurate pen location inputs, and supporting multiple screen operations simultaneously all go a long way towards greatly improving the user experience.
The controller’s ability to support resolutions of up to 4096 x 4096 should help e-paper move beyond the palm-sized displays where it’s mostly in use today into applications requiring large-format displays (up to 11 x 17). It can even drive two separate side-by-side displays for a more book-like feel. Having this higher resolution available also opens the possibility of supporting gray scales beyond the 16-level capability of the display by using bit dithering techniques on small clusters of pixels. The controller’s 16/32 bit mobile SDRAM interface allows it to use the inexpensive, widely available storage media that’s commonly in use by most handheld products.
Designers with strict power budgets will appreciate the S1D13521B modest power consumption that complements an EPD zero-power static state. Its 175 mW active power state comprises a small fraction of its operation with the majority of time (98%+) spent in standby (4.8 mW) or sleep (0.01 mW) in a typical application. Power is further conserved with a special idle state (22 mW) that the controller enters between multiple operations.
The S1D13521B is designed specifically to work with E Ink http://www.eink.com products so it’s no surprise that their prototype kit includes one of their Vizplex active matrix displays http://www.eink.com/products/matrix/High_Res.html along with a generic Linux-based application processor board and the display controller board with Epson chip (it’s at the lower right corner of the electronics in the photo). The standard kit includes a 6-inch ePaper display that’s comparable to the one found on Amazon’s Kindle reader, but you can order a larger one (up to 9.7 inches) as an option. You also get demo software for several applications and a library of basic functions.
 Samples of the Epson S1D13521B will be available in May 2008. Production quantities will be available in August 2008. Sample price will be $18.
The Broadsheet AM300 prototype kit being offered by E Ink is the fastest way to start working with E Ink technology using the Epson EPD controller. The Broadsheet kit will enable engineers to rapidly prototype and develop next-generation ePaper products. Compatible with 5-in., 6-in., 8-in., and 9.7-in. active matrix displays, the kit allows users to quickly create functional, low-profile product mock-ups using the kit’s modular design. The AM300 will be shipping in June 2008 and can be pre-ordered at E Ink’s web site.
Product Page
EPD Basics
For those of you unfamiliar with e-paper, it’s easy to think of the display as a sandwich of glass or plastic film filled with a layer of micro-encapsulated cells of semi-opaque white solution which have extremely fine dark ‘ink’ particles suspended in them. The surface can be made darker or lighter by moving the particles closer or further from the font of the display using a series of pulsed electrostatic charges.
Gray scaling is accomplished by using a more complex series of pulses to position the ink particles at some middle position in the capsule, with each pulse taking about 20 ms. A simple black-white transition involves 12 - 13 pulses but moving them precisely enough to deliver a gray scale requires more pulses (26 - 30 pulses to achieve eight-levels). Pushing today’s EDPs resolution to their maximum-rated16 shades can mean transition times of up to 750 ms. Compounding the challenge is the fact that the displays are temperature sensitive, requiring more or less charge depending on how viscous the suspension fluid is.
Despite these difficulties, and the fact that today’s EPDs are monochrome-only, they offer several advantages over LCDs including extremely good readability under both daylight and indoor conditions without any backlighting. Add to that high resolution (150+ dpi) a wide, paper-like viewing angle, and the fact that EPDs only draw power for a short time when the content is updated and you can see why there is so much interest in this display technology. We’re already seeing early applications of e-paper in things like Amazon’s wildly-successful Kindle e-book reader but I think that the real place e-paper will find its first big market is replacing printed reference manuals and other bulky technical literature that would benefit from the electronic cross-referencing and Internet access that digital media permits but don’t lend themselves well to being read from a laptop. Once EPDs mature a bit more, we may well see them bridging the gap between printed newspapers and magazines and their on-line counterparts and begin to make a huge dent in the amount of timber and energy that currently go into making print stock. Think of it, you’ll be able to take the latest issue of EN-Genius to the kitchen table or your favorite bench at the park!
I don’t think e-paper is going to totally replace books for recreational reading (at least I hope not) but there are many places where its lower distribution costs and its ability to support interactive features could make it a more useful, and more sustainable way to display information.
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