Samsung Electronics is one of the world’s largest home electronics companies in the world and one of its biggest markets is the manufacturing of displays for everything from TVs to mobile phones and tablets. The company has now acquired another tool when purchasing Liquavista, a developer of energy efficient display technologies.
Liquavista works primarily with electrowetting technology that will enable companies to manufacture displays with bright colors and really low power consumption. Screens with Liquavista’s technology offers twice as high release of the backlighting as regular LCD screens, while consuming as little as 10% of the battery power used by the same LCD technology, which means both bridghter and more efficient.
Available in 3 distinct modes; transmissive, reflective and transflective, Liquavista’s technology is the only solution, other than LCD, which operates in all 3 modes modes, but with 2x, 3x, 4x optical performance. Liquavista’s display cell concepts allow radically brighter and more efficient flat panel displays to be built – but use today’s established manufacturing infrastructure and processes to achieve it.
Electrowetting also enables flexible and transparent displays, something Samsung hopes to make use if in several product areas; primarily e-book readers, smartphones, media players and other mobile products that often occur outside of the home.
Even if Liquavista has made great progress with electrowetting there are still problems to solve. The response time of the electrowetting technology used by e.g. E Ink screens is around 250ms. Liquvista claims to have managed to lower this by 70%, which is still relatively high with around 75 ms. With an update frequency of around 13 Hz Samsung has pointed out that it will continue to work with Liquavista’s electrowetting technology to bring forth update frequencies that can measure up to current screens.
Samsung hasn’t revealed anything on when we can expect to see electrowetting in any products, but if we can get brighter screens with one tenth of the power consumptions we’re very interested.
