Design of Driving Waveform Based on a Damping Oscillation for Optimizing Red Saturation in Three-Color Electrophoretic Displays

Micromachines (Basel). 2021 Feb 7;12(2):162. doi: 10.3390/mi12020162.

Abstract

At present, three-color electrophoretic displays (EPDs) have problems of dim brightness and insufficient color saturation. In this paper, a driving waveform based on a damping oscillation was proposed to optimize the red saturation in three-color EPDs. The optimized driving waveform was composed of an erasing stage, a particles activation stage, a red electrophoretic particles purification stage, and a red display stage. The driving duration was set to 360 ms, 880 ms, 400 ms, and 2400 ms, respectively. The erasing stage was used to erase the current pixel state and refresh to a black state. The particles' activation stage was set as two cycles, and then refreshed to the black state. The red electrophoretic particles' purification stage was a damping oscillation driving waveform. The red and black electrophoretic particles were separated by changing the magnitude and polarity of applied electric filed, so that the red electrophoretic particles were purified. The red display stage was a low positive voltage, and red electrophoretic particles were driven to the common electrode to display a red state. The experimental results showed that the maximum red saturation could reach 0.583, which was increased by 27.57% compared with the traditional driving waveform.

Keywords: damping oscillation; driving waveform; electrophoretic displays; particles separation; red saturation.