Real-time video signal processor for electrophoretic displays

Playing videos on the electronic paper, which is composed of the electrophoretic display (EPD), is an attractive feature, but none of commercial EPDs supports it. This is because the response time of the EPD is much longer than liquid crystal displays. In addition, the number of gray tones shown on the EPD is quite limited, and the state transitions between successive frames can be achieved by complicated driving waveforms. These issues result in the difficulties of supporting video display function on the EPD. In this paper, we propose a new real-time signal processor for the EPD. The processor is composed of hardware modules for producing halftoned video frames, encoding video data, and sending driving waveform to the display in real time to show good quality of videos on the EPD.