Portable electronic ink display prototypes shown at forum

ISUPPLI HELD A BIG Flat Displays Conference earlier this month and one of the presentations we've just received caught our eye.

The presentation, by Darren Bischoff, product marketing manager at the E Ink Corporation, points out the big obstacle to reading e-books and e-magazines like ours on handhelds and notebooks.

Using the current LCD technology, if you incresae the screen size a device uses more power, weighs more, and is therefore far more fragile. There's subsequently a trade off between display size, performance and portability, and that's a problem E Ink wants to address.

While the display technology works fine enough, other limitations include limited readability, said Bischoff, while the viewing angle isn't good while the power hungry displays just eat up your battery life, as any notebook user knows to her or his cost.

What E Ink wants to happen is that devices will have high contrast and reflectivity, high resolution to 200+ PPI, with devices readable in even bright sunlight, and no angle of viewing to get in the way. And it proposes that the form factor be no heavier or bigger than a paper product, weight less than 1lb, using a small batter that gives weeks of usage, and shatterproof.

Here's a diagram which shows how E Ink is thinking, from the presentation:

The stability of electronic ink, said Bischoff, means that no power whatever is needed to keep an image on the screen, and the displays are highly reflective.

While the first displays using this technology are likely to be hybrid, using some elements of glass displays and with a thickness of .9mm compared, future flexible displays will be only .5mm or so, and use a plastic front plane, an ink layer, and a flexible backplane.

E Ink has produced two prototypes, using a-SI TFT on stainless steel foil substrates, one which measures 1.6-inch diagonally, shows 80 PPI, and is only .3mm thick, while the other is 3-inch diagonally, has a res of 96 PPI (240 x 160 pixels), and is a similar thickness.

The firm eventually wants to produce RadioPaper - a device that has flexible pages, the size of a tabloid, laid out like a newspaper and which connects via wireless to the news source.

While E Ink supplies the electronic ink, Toppan might produce the Frontplane Laminate, Philips the active matrix display module, and then others would OEM the sets.

Finally, here's a prototype that the firm showed at the forum, which has a six inch diagonal display, SVGA resolution, two bit greyscale, 36% reflectance, 9:1 contrast ration, a 1800 viewing angle, an E Ink front plane, and a Philips designed backplane and drive electronics. µ

iSuppli web site
E Ink web page