Samsung will be adding to its already impressive line of display technologies. Samsung today announced that it has acquired Netherlands-based display technology firm Liquivista.
Liquavista, founded in 2006 as a spin-out from the Philips Research Labs, offers a new type of electronic display technology known as electrowetting for applications in eReaders, mobile phones, media players and other mobile devices.
According to a press release, electrowetting operates in transmissive, reflective, transparent and transflective modes and “enables the creation of displays with bright, colorful images with dramatically reduced power consumption.” Samsung claims that electrowetting consumes just 10 percent of the battery power of existing display technologies.
Samsung says it will use the newly acquired technology in e-Paper and transparent displays. Electrowetting can be manufactured by modifying existing LCD production lines, which will allow Samsung to integrate manufacturing of the new displays with its existing display lines.
In e-paper applications, the response time of the electrowetting displays will be more than 70 times faster than that of existing reflective displays, allowing for color videos, which was previously thought impossible. In the future, the application of the technology is expected to expand to transparent, transmissive and transflective displays.
Samsung’s existing line of Super AMOLED displays has emerged as capable competitor to Apple’s new retina display. Super AMOLOED and AMOLED displays are popular with Android OEMs for brilliant colors and low battery consumption.
