http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222200558

I know this information regarding TI's new chips for e-ink based ereaders was mentioned before but this article gave some insight I hadn't realized before.

The new chip and software will combine to replace some 40 discreet components currently found in EBRs using e-ink. It will also increase battery charge life by 50%.

"Based on an e-book using a 6-inch E-Ink electrophoretic display (EPD) with a 600 milliamp/hour battery, readers could get up to 14,800 page turns, 50 percent better than current e-book," he added. Idle time for an e-book that continuously displays a single page is about four weeks, significantly longer than other e-books, Burke said.

Leave it on the page your reading without touching it for weeks :) and still have battery left.

Their software gets rid of the dedicated display driver as well as the need fro ram for frame buffering and since the display driver is software e-ink can make updates without needing chip makers to redesign.


This is allot of good stuff - longer battery life, cheaper devices, thin/smaller devices, faster devices .

So TI wants to get some of the Freescale's pie. Well, some healthy competition is always good for the market.

They don't just want Freescale's pie, they want to turn it into a cake. Greater integration of the silicon is the one area in which we can expect some real progress for ereaders. This is certainly good news, as opposed to the lackluster announcements concerning new display technology.

"Based on an e-book using a 6-inch E-Ink electrophoretic display (EPD) with a 600 milliamp/hour battery, readers could get up to 14,800 page turns, 50 percent better than current e-book," he added. Idle time for an e-book that continuously displays a single page is about four weeks, significantly longer than other e-books, Burke said."

Uh, since current readers are rated at around 7k page turns, 14k turns would be a 100% increase.

If he is wrong on basic math, it makes me question what else he might have wrong.

Based on the battery throughput he posits, he may well be right. Dosn't mean that's a typical actual throughput ofc :)