Liquavista launches low-power displays

An old concept gets a new purpose with the introduction of Netherlands-based Liquavista's new line of displays using electrowetting technology.

The company, which also has offices in the U.K. and Hong Kong, said the low-power displays will start to show up in watches and cell phone secondary displays in the last half of 2009. Electrowetting uses a layer of colored oil that acts as an optical shutter when activated by a voltage, and can be used produce different designs and effects, in addition to just showing the time.

"Electrowetting has actually been known about for 150 years. It's a very old phenomenon, an old physical phenomenon," Mark Gostick, CEO of Liquavista, told the Cleantech Group.

"What's happened in the last 10 years is a lot of materials being developed for other applications, actually, which have enabled what's called microfluidic electrowetting — so, the manipulation of very small quantities of fluids."

Gostick said there are already applications on the market using electrowetting, such as lab on a chip systems, variable focus lenses, and some batteries which use electrowetting to enhance performance.

Liquavista is specializing in the display applications, using technology that was originally developed at the Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, Netherlands, run by Philips Electronics (NYSE: PHG). It was spun-out in 2006 and has received €20 million in funding from New Venture Partners, GIMV and Amadeus Capital.

Gostick said Philips still holds a small stake in the company, but Liquavista owns the technology and related patents.

The new displays, called ColorBright, can function in all lighting environments from dark to direct sunlight, and offer significant power savings over the more common LCDs.

Take a look at some ColorBright displays here >>

"If you take it against something like an active matrix liquid crystal, which is what most people have in their phone, for example, then the comparable version of our technology uses something like 90 percent less power," said Gostick.

That could make a significant difference in battery life, with displays using between 33 and 75 percent of the power in a cell phone, according to Gostick.

"Depending on what you're doing with the phone, whether you're just making a phone call or whether you're browsing the Web or watching TV, it uses different amounts, but it's always quite a power hungry element of the overall phone system."

In addition to being more energy efficient, the company said the technology will be low-cost to manufacture, with most of the manufacturing cycle using standard LCD manufacturing equipment and processes.

"We have a different, what's called a filling process, which is at the back end of the process," he said. "But apart from that, all the equipment's the same as in a liquid crystal plant."

Liquavista recently opened its first volume fabrication production line in Dongguang Fenggang in southern China. The new facility is hosted and supported by an existing LCD factory owned by Hong Kong-based Glory Sound.

"The scale of the line that we've put in to start with is a thing called Generation 2, which refers to the glass size of the process, and something like that can produce low millions a year," said Gostick.

"But we have plans to expand that capacity as we grow the demand in the marketplace."

Earlier this month, the company joined with Mountain View, Calif.-based Plastic Logic, a developer of low-power plastic circuits, on a project to develop a flexible, full-color e-paper display. That £12 million, three-year project is partially funded by the U.K. government-backed Technology Strategy Board.

Liquavista and Plastic Logic have a common investor, with Plastic Logic raising $50 million in funding earlier this year from return backers Oak Investment Partners and Amadeus Capital, which also backs Liquavista.

Liquavista may be starting small, with watches and phones, but it has plans for its electrowetting technology in larger displays, and Gostick said the company is starting a new funding round now.

"The roadmap is that we believe that we can go anywhere that liquid crystal has gone," he said.

"Although our early products are going to be in what's called reflective mode, which is where you get the low power consumption, you can also make it in transmissive mode, which is how LCD works. And that's important, because it means you can get into things like TVs and notebooks."

Even in transmissive mode, Gostick said the Liquavista displays are energy efficient. He said the larger displays can save between 50 and 80 percent of the power that an LCD uses for the equivalent front of screen performance.