P-62: An Integrated Back-end System Design for Active Matrix Electrophoretic Display

The active matrix electrophoretic display (AMEPD) has been commonly used for the applications of smart hand‐held reading devices such as E‐books and E‐news. However, due to facing other competitors in this market, the hardware cost of the back‐end system and panels are necessary to reduce. This paper presents an integrated back‐end system design for AMEPDs. A controller IC which integrates T‐CON and CPU functions has been developed. It also has the function of the 16 multi‐pipeline update design. The new controller IC makes lower total system hardware cost, better ability of lower power states, high flexibility in panel resolution, signal timing of source/gate drivers and Vcom. It has significantly expanded system integration and functionality features. In addition, the integrated power IC which supports output voltages of source/gate drivers and Vcom is proposed. Therefore, the hardware cost of the power system is much lower. The implementation of the new controller and power ICs is verified by the 6″ AMEPD panel produced by Chunghwa Picture Tubes, LTD (CPT). It is in use with the single‐chip structure which integrates the functions of source and gate drivers. The resolution can achieve 800 × 600 (167dpi). Depending on our integrated AMEPD back‐end system, the testing results of our 6″ AMEPD panel performance can reach 48% reflectance, 16 gray level and 8:1 contrast ratio.