Electrophoretic Display Controller Integrated With Real-Time Halftoning and Partial Region Update

Electrophoretic displays (EPDs) have become the main solution to electronic paper because of its invariably reflective and bistable properties. With different requirements of display resolution, speed, and contrast ratio, the electronic paper (E-paper) designers may adopt different types of electrophoretic material and active matrix backplane for building the system. The driving waveforms should be also customized for accommodating different application specifications and environment temperature. In this paper, we present a configurable EPD controller which can support various application specifications. In addition to providing a new architecture of compacted waveform lookup tables, the controller supports partial image update and integrates a real-time halftoning engine for improving image quality. The design has been implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and tested with several real EPDs.