Power Savings
Few things can cause the same anxiety as the ‘low battery’ symbol flashing
on a mobile telephone. Power consumption is a hot issue for any mobile
application, and research shows that users avoid using revenue generating
services like web-browsing,TV, and location based services to avoid running
down the battery. Also, the display backlight is turned off at every opportunity
to conserve power, leaving a ‘black hole’ in the product design. The trend
towards smaller, more mobile devices with less space for the battery together
with more services driving display use creates an ongoing power consumption
problem that slow improving battery technology will not solve alone.
The same factors that make Liquavista’s displays intrinsically the brightest
and most vivid also provide us with the solution to longer battery life
in a world where video and animation is core to almost all applications.
Because the displays are so significantly brighter, they require less
supplementary illumination. For example, in mobile handsets, the backlighting
system of a contemporary display may account for as much as 20x the power
consumption of the display itself. In fact, for many applications Liquavista’s
displays can be used entirely in high performance reflective mode alone.
Other techniques rely on bi-stability to offer low power stand-by modes.
However, this has its own disadvantages, as generating video performance
and/or a significant number of grey scales with a bi-stable pixel inevitably
leads to very high complexity and losses in efficiency, and/or a significant
rise in power consumption.
