Abstract
During the last decades, tremendous efforts have been carried out to develop flexible electronics for a vast array of applications. Among all different applications investigated in this area, flexible displays have gained significant attention, being a vital part of large-area devices, portable systems and electronic labels etc electrophoretic (EP) ink displays have outstanding properties such as a superior optical switch contrast and low power consumption, besides being compatible with flexible electronics. However, the EP ink technology requires an active matrix-addressing scheme to enable exclusive addressing of individual pixels. EP ink pixels cannot be incorporated in low cost and easily manufactured passive matrix circuits due to the lack of threshold voltage and nonlinearity, necessities to provide addressability. Here, we suggest a simple method to introduce nonlinearity and threshold voltage in EP ink display cells in order to make them passively addressable. Our method exploits the nonlinearity of an organic ferroelectric capacitor that introduces passive addressability in display cells. The organic ferroelectric material poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-trifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-TrFE)) is here chosen because of its simple manufacturing protocol and good polarizability. We demonstrate that a nonlinear EP cell with bistable states can be produced by depositing a P(VDF-TrFE) film on the bottom electrode of the display cell. The P(VDF-TrFE) capacitor and the EP ink cell are separately characterized in order to match the surface charge at their respective interfaces and to achieve and optimize bistable operation of display pixels.
Highlights
With an increasing demand for thin, flexible, light-weight electronics on the market, a major research effort is directed towards developing flexible displays that run at low power consumption protocols and are possible to produce using a simple and low-cost fabrication process [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
Electrophoretic (EP) inks have been considered as one of the candidates for such applications due to their ability to be integrated with flexible electronics, superior optical properties and low power consumption when incorporated in electrophoretic image displays (EPIDs) [8,9,10]
We show that by connecting a P(VDF-TrFE) capacitor to one of the EPID cell electrodes a threshold voltage can be introduced in the EPID cell current-voltage characteristics making the cell addressable in a Passive Matrix (PM) configuration
Summary
With an increasing demand for thin, flexible, light-weight electronics on the market, a major research effort is directed towards developing flexible displays that run at low power consumption protocols and are possible to produce using a simple and low-cost fabrication process [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. The EP ink technology consists of colored charged particles in an inert media that is encapsulated between a rear and a transparent top electrode. A display device consists of individual pixels that are exclusively addressable to enable updating of the image to be displayed. Individual pixels are addressed via row and column lines. PM addressing has a simpler architecture as compared to the AM; the crossing between a row electrode and a column electrode together with the characteristics of the pixel device is utilized to achieve addressability. Since PM does not require any active addressing circuitry in each pixel, it is tempting to consider PM addressing before AM ditto, since a PM addressing circuit is relatively much simpler and enables a fabrication protocol of lower cost. Addressability in a PM scheme requires pixels with a current-voltage and switching characteristic that is strongly non-linear
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