Hardware engine for supporting gray-tone paintbrush function on electrophoretic papers

The electrophoretic display (EPD) has been widely applied on electronic readers (E-Readers) for displaying image/text contents. With a touch panel, the user can put annotations on the contents at will. However, none of the available E-Readers support the function of paintbrush, which allows the user to plot gray tone figures. This is because the EPD is a bistable display whose driving method is quite complicated. In this paper, we first discuss the issues of realizing paintbrush function on the EPD display controller and then propose a new signal processing engine for the paintbrush function. The engine contains four stages: 1) screening the detected pixel coordinates; 2) interpolating pixels; 3) performing image halftoning to generate more visual gray levels; and 4) driving the pixels to the target states. The experimental results show that the engine meets the real-time requirement to complete the pixel interpolation as well as produce the gray-tone traces.