Electrophoretic Display Controller Integrated With Real-Time Halftoning and Partial Region Update

Electrophoretic displays (EPDs) have become the main solution to electronic paper because of its invariably reflective and bistable properties. With different requirements of display resolution, speed, and contrast ratio, the electronic paper (E-paper) designers may adopt different types of electrophoretic material and active matrix backplane for building the system. The driving waveforms should be also customized for accommodating different application specifications and environment temperature. In this paper, we present a configurable EPD controller which can support various application specifications. In addition to providing a new architecture of compacted waveform lookup tables, the controller supports partial image update and integrates a real-time halftoning engine for improving image quality. The design has been implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and tested with several real EPDs.

[1]  Jan Doutreloigne,et al.  Driving-Scheme Algorithms for Intelligent Energy-Efficient High-Voltage Display Drivers , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers.

[2]  Herbert De Smet,et al.  Complete electrical and optical simulation of electronic paper , 2006, Displays.

[3]  Robert W. Zehner,et al.  31.2: A5 Sized Electronic Paper Display for Document Viewing , 2005 .

[4]  J. Jacobson,et al.  An electrophoretic ink for all-printed reflective electronic displays , 1998, Nature.

[5]  Kimberly J. Allen.  Reel to Real: Prospects for Flexible Displays , 2005, Proceedings of the IEEE.

[6]  Holly G. Gates,et al.  46.3: High Performance Active Matrix Electrophoretic Display Controller , 2008 .

[7]  I. Ota,et al.  Electrophoretic image display (EPID) panel , 1973 .

[8]  Karl R. Amundson,et al.  68.1: Invited Paper: Achieving Graytone Images in a Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Display , 2006 .

[9]  Ph. W. Besslich.  Comments on Electronic Techniques for Pictorial Image Reproduction , 1983, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[10]  V. Novotny,et al.  An electrophoretic display, its properties, model, and addressing , 1979, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[11]  Jack Hou,et al.  Microcup® displays: Electronic paper by roll‐to‐roll manufacturing processes , 2003 .

[12]  Wen-Chung Kao,et al.  Configurable timing controller design for active matrix electrophoretic display , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

[13]  Tatsuya Shimoda,et al.  54.3: A Flexible 2‐in. QVGA LTPS‐TFT Electrophoretic Display , 2005 .

[14]  Tatsuya Shimoda,et al.  High-resolution microencapsulated electrophoretic display (EPD) driven by poly-si TFTs with four-level grayscale , 2002 .

[15]  B. Lippel,et al.  The Effect of Dither on Luminance Quantization of Pictures , 1971 .

[16]  Hiroya Kodama,et al.  56.2: Computational Modeling of Pigment Dispersions in an Electrophoretic Display , 2005 .

[17]  B. Fitzhenry-Ritz,et al.  Optical properties of electrophoretic image displays , 1981, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[18]  Wen-Chung Kao,et al.  Image quality improvement for electrophoretic displays by combining contrast enhancement and halftoning techniques , 2009, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

[19]  Tadao Nakamura,et al.  Development of active‐matrix electronic‐ink displays for handheld devices , 2004 .

[20]  Holly G. Gates,et al.  37.2: Improved Electronic Controller for Image Stable Displays , 2006 .

[21]  Y. Komatsu.  A Flexible 7.1-in. Active-Matrix Electrophoretic Display , 2006 .

[22]  Robert W. Zehner,et al.  20.2: Drive Waveforms for Active Matrix Electrophoretic Displays , 2003 .

[23]  Alex Henzen,et al.  High‐quality images on electrophoretic displays , 2006 .

[24]  Herbert De Smet,et al.  The microscopic physics of electronic paper revealed , 2003 .