South China Normal University Announces Latest Achievements in Color Video Electronic Paper

The birth of the outdoor billboard based on the segmented low-power electrowetting-based color video e-paper

According to Professor Zhou, the team has successfully developed various colored inks, including cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink. With the help of optical modeling and an optical test, the team has successfully achieved the colored e-paper display by adopting three layers of color ink materials and stacking them on top of each other. All the materials and processes for enabling the samples/products, including front-panel related color inks, functional films, fabrication process, multilayer coupling, driving waveform and the final integration, are secured with hundreds of patents. A 40x40cm tiled e-paper outdoor billboard based on electrowetting, which was shown at the exhibition, has a resolution of 32x32 and a refresh rate of 50Hz. It can display a variety of colors and colored video content with good contrast and reflectivity.

According to Professor Alex Henzen, the core member of the SCNU team and technical leader on e-paper, "The outdoor billboards made of such an electrowetting based reflective e-paper technology may take up less than 1% of the power consumption of equally-sized LED and TFT-LCD display products and has large market potential."

Successful development of electrowetting-based monochrome active-matrix video e-paper displays

The team has successfully developed electrowetting-based monochrome video e-paper displays on an a-Si TFT substrate with a high resolution. Through their proprietary Gen2.5 pilot line, a first 4.2-inch monochrome high-performance electrowetting display has been manufactured. A prototype spacer is used between the cover plate and the baseplate so as to improve its display performance. The spacer is a critical component and process for high-resolution displays such as TFT-LCD and e-papers. Due to the specific display structure of electrowetting displays, there is no mature solution at present. The spacer technique presented by the SCNU team fills the blank space in this technical field, optimizing the performance of electrowetting based e-paper displays and thus provides key support for industrialization.

"Electrowetting display and its successful industrialization have strong expandability and extendability both horizontally and vertically in the whole display field," emphasized by Professor Guofu Zhou. "Horizontally, electrowetting based e-paper can be applied to various products including display panels, outdoor billboards and smart watches, and thus inject strong vitality for these types of products. Vertically, the fabrication process of electrowetting based e-paper, involving printing processes, could be extended to other printing display technologies to promote the development of display industry."

About South China Normal University

Institute of Electronic Paper Displays at South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics of South China Normal University was founded in 2012 by a group of original core members of the Philips e-paper display research and development team. The institute focuses mainly on the research, development and industrialization of green optoelectronic technologies, particularly the electronic paper displays with color and video capability as the major challenges. Since the grant of National Research and Development Program of China (No.2016YFB0401500), the institute, jointly with 12 other institutes, has accelerated the innovation and made significant progress in the past year. More than 100 patents have been created so far, and new products have been developed through cooperation with the startup company of the team and SCNU.

SOURCE Institute of Electronic Paper Displays, South China Academy of Advanced Optoelectronics, South China Normal University