Over the River and through the Woods
“Over the river and through the woods,
To grandmother’s house we go.
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.”
I was thinking of this old song as I drove to Burlington, Vermont to join my sister’s extended family for the Thanksgiving holiday when my horse lost its way. That is, the pulley for my horse’s — okay, car’s — serpentine belt seized, leaving me with no power steering and a slowly discharging battery.
Consequently, I am now sitting in the pleasant customer lounge at Modern Tire and Auto Service in Rocky Hill, Connecticut, waiting for the necessary parts to arrive and thinking of what I should write for the Display Daily you are now reading. And I’ve got it: This is the perfect time to catch up on a story I couldn’t cover when it broke, and which you, dear readers, might have missed.
In mid-October, Nate Hoffelder of the Digital Reader obtained confirmation from Amazon that the company “can confirm that Liquavista is no longer operation.” In 2004, if memory serves, a Philips research group gave the first public demonstration of its electrowetting technology at a mid-sized SID meeting in a place where there were palm trees. Briefly, very briefly, EW technoloy used a colored oil drop in a one-pixel display cell. The materials were selected such that the oil wetted the bottom of the cell. When an electric charge was applied to the oil, it reformed as a drop that retreated to a corner of the cell, allowing light to either pass through the cell or reflect off the cell bottom. I was enthusiastic about this initial four-pixel technology demonstration and discussed it in the Information Display article reporting on the conference.
The technology was exciting because it promised to provide a low-power reflective display with color and video rate. Since the main eReader technology, then and now, was E Ink’s monochrome, non-video-rate electrophoretic technology, there seemed to be a large and obvious niche for EW.
Liquavista was spun off from Philips in 2006, purchased by Samsung in 2011, was reacquired by its executives in (approximately) 2012, and was then purchased by Amazon in 2013. At that point, Liquavista’s previously chatty staffers went silent.
Until disappearing into Amazon’s maw, development of EW technology was steady but, not surprisingly, slower than anticipated. Samsung lost patience, and we now have confirmation that Amazon has, too. Many industry watchers, including yours truly, were puzzled that Amazon bought Liquavista to begin with. It was clear by that time that people who wanted to consume their documents in color were happy to do so on an LCD or OLED screen, and those screens were becoming sufficiently efficient that battery life had ceased to be an issue for most users most of the time.
And so it remains to this day. – Ken Werner
Analyst Comment
Electrowetting is still under development as a concept, but eTulipa, which has some roots in the Liquavista technology, but is being brought to production in Taiwan. For an overview of developments, see our articles here. (BR)
(Note – the article was edited after publication to fix a typo that stated that E Ink’s technology was electrochromic – it is, of course, electrophoretic. Ed.
Ken Werner is Principal of Nutmeg Consultants, specializing in the display industry, manufacturing, technology, and applications, including mobile devices, automotive, and television. He consults for attorneys, investment analysts, and companies re-positioning themselves within the display industry or using displays in their products. He is the 2017 recipient of the Society for Information Display’s Lewis and Beatrice Winner Award. You can reach him at [email protected].
