An electrophoretic display driving waveform based on improvement of activation pattern

Abstract

Electrophoretic display (EPD) technology has become one of the main supporting pillars of the electronic paper display industry. Despite its benefits, the EPD technology suffers from several disadvantages such as non-fixed threshold voltage value for gray scale display. In addition, the display has to repeatedly refresh between white and black states to eliminate ghost image when it needs to update a new image. The traditional driving waveform for the EPD includes four stages: erasing the original image, resetting to black state, clearing to white state, and writing a new image. A flicker can be found when transferring between two adjacent stages. A new driving waveform based on the improvement of activation pattern is proposed to weaken the ghost image and reduce the flicker. Experimental results show that the proposed driving waveform could weaken the ghost image effectively and reduce the number of flickers by 50%. Compared with the traditional driving waveform, the driving waveform of this work has a better performance.