Electronic Paper Display Driver Promises Huge Potential Growth in Electronic Shelf Labels and Display Card Market
(Hong Kong – 15 March, 2010) Solomon Systech Limited, a pioneer in the area of display driver ICs for electronic paper (“e-paper”) displays, has identified enormous potential growth in a number of potentially huge markets for e-paper displays. Solomon Systech is currently one of the major display driver IC suppliers for leading system providers in electronic shelf labels (“ESL”) applications; The market penetration of ESL in price label application is still very small at the moment. In order to expand further in this huge potential market, Solomon Systech has engaged with a number of display companies to provide customized ESL solutions for supermarkets, based on e-paper technology. ESL, with segmented displays or small graphic displays, can deliver most update product price and information to consumers when they visit the supermarket or local store. Solomon Systech delivers various IC solutions to display manufacturers for such application, no matter it is based on direct drive or active matrix electrophoretic display, cholesteric display, or even on LCD technologies. Electronic labels are also under consideration by fashion clothing retailers to implement an e-paper display into the price tag on clothing items in-store. Therefore, the potential of e-paper in electronic label application is enormous.
Another huge potential area would be the display card market. When consumer visits supermarket’s checkout, the personalized display card can be used to collect loyalty points, or it can display credit/debit when payment is made at the checkout. Initially, all these applications required a basic display driver, independent of the display technology used in the card. But as retailers trying to increase in-store consumer interaction, it requires higher functionality ICs, some with integrated MCU’s, depending on the exact requirements for a particular application. “Most people look upon e-paper to have a very exciting future for E-reader. On the other hand, we believe there is a huge market for small, low power e-paper display in electronic labels, display cards and metering applications”, said Raymond Wang, Business Operations Director of Solomon Systech. “Therefore we put heavy effort in developing new ICs to capture this huge potential market. We also develop custom solutions for our display technology partners to add more functionalities and higher value to our customers. This increased level of integration means higher value-added ICs from Solomon Systech while at the same time, lower the overall system costs and upgrade the system performance for our customers”, he continued. “E-paper business is critical to deliver growth in the coming years for Solomon Systech and it is a strategically important market for us”.
 |
Direct segment Electrophoretic Display (EPD) E-paper
|
 |
Cholesteric Display (ChLCD)
|