Electronic-paper pioneer E Ink and SoC giant Freescale Semiconductor this morning announced an intellectual-property agreement that will allow Freescale to integrate E Ink¡¯s Vizplex display controller IP onto Freescale¡¯s ARM-based microcontroller SoCs. The two companies both claim market leadership in their respective portions¡ªdisplays and system chips¡ªof the eBook market, so the agreement could influence the future direction of hardware architectures for the devices.

Today the E Ink Vizplex controller is usually a separate chip in an eBook, according to Freescale director of product management Ken Obuszewski. Integrating the controller into the system SoC will accomplish at least two important goals.

First, the integration will provide some leverage on system cost. Obuszewski said that simply eliminating one package from the eBook design could achieve a single-digit-percentage reduction in cost. The cost benefit is limited to some degree by the fact that the eBook will still require a discrete high-voltage driver chip between the controller and the display panel. Yet, even though such a decrease in cost is not breakthrough territory, any reduction is important in a time when the price of eBooks remains a serious customer concern.

Second, and perhaps more important in the long run, ¡°having the controller on the same die with the processor gives us a control point for achieving higher performance and, potentially, more features,¡± Obuszewski said.

Obuszewski would not speculate on particular features in coming eBooks, but he did say that such things as color displays ¡°will come in the not-too-distant future,¡± and would require more intensive display-controller activity. In addition, the use of gesture-based user-interfaces on eBooks could benefit from a low-latency, high-bandwidth link between the display controller and the touch-panel controller in the SoC.

The agreement could also be a useful market-share tool for Freescale, creating an entry barrier against other ARM-based SoC vendors who might want to hop on the eBook bandwagon

By: DocMemory
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