March 2013

E Ink Holdings announced today that Scott Liu resigned as Chairman and CEO of the company. Vice Chairman Felix Ho has been named interim Chairman and CEO. Scott Liu joined Prime View International (PVI) in 2001 and became the Chairman and CEO in 2004. Under his leadership, PVI bought E Ink and became E Ink Holdings, the world's leading e-paper company.

Scott Liu said that he resigned due to personal reasons.

Amazon are now offering an Arduino E Ink Shield from Aerospace Robotics. It appears the display can only show characters, but it supports 175 languages and the text and position can be customized. The E Ink display supports four gray levels, and that's the only available technical info.

The E Ink Arduino Shield is now shipping for $59.95.

According to Bloomberg, Samsung wants to sell its electrowetting display unit LiquaVista which they bought back in January 2011. They are currently in talks with Amazon, that will pay a sub-$100 million sum to Samsung for the unit. According to the report, a Samsung spokesperson admitted that the Liquavista acquisition "didn't meet its expectations".

I believe Amazon does want to bring new life into its Kindle e-reader line, and LiquaVista's display can enable color e-paper displays with a fast refresh rate compared to E Ink. On the other hand the technology is much less mature and I'm not sure if Amazon is the sort of company to actually succeed in commercializing such a technology. This one is going to be interesting to watch...

Digi-Key, a global electronic components distributor signed a global distribution agreement with E Ink that allows Digi-Key to offer E-Ink's innovative, standard segmented displays to their worldwide customer base.

ICAP Patent Brokerage is going to auction an IP package of high-definition, full-color e-paper innovations from the Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation, Yonsei University.

ICAP says that the IP package features a flexible electrophoretic display capable of displaying multi-color, high-definition images. The IP portfolio covers a grayscale representation unit with various charged particles for displaying grayscale by using light reflection and transmission. The color in the display is presented by using colored particles in an electrode placed above the grayscale unit. These colored particles are made of metallic nano-particles and formed in a specific pattern on the upper electrode for presenting a high-definition, multi-color colored display. Manufacturing of the colored particles or layers may include slurry process, screen printing, ink-jet, or nano-printing that may have high industrial applicability and is cost effective.

Plastic Logic developed a new OTFT-based flexible 42" e-paper (E Ink) display that they will show for the first time at RetailTech Japan together with Toppan printing. The two companies will jointly work to bring these displays to the market and find applications for them.

Plastic Logic's new display is actually made from 16 10.7" flexible panels tiled together (4X4 as can be seen from the photo above). The whole display is less than 3 mm thick and is very light, and so can be hung on a wall like a poster.