Electronic Paper Driven with LCD Driver Chip

The electronic paper (ePaper) is equipped with a thin-film-transistor (TFT) matrix backplane, but their driving methods are different from liquid crystal display (LCD). The polarity of the driving voltage on LCD is interchanged frame by frame or pixel by pixel for maintaining the reliability of liquid crystal. However, driving a pixel on the ePaper is according to the polarity of the supply voltage and their gray tone is controlled by pulse width modulation. This paper aims at presenting a new driving scheme which allows the ePaper system designers for simply adopting the commercial TFT backplane with the drive chips for LCD to integrate the entire system The ePaper system design can share the same TFT backplane and the driver chips for LCD. Thus the ePaper module manufacturing process becomes much easier and cheaper.