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The Qualcomm Mirasol is a display screen much like a e-ink display screen. Qualcomm Mirasol Team said it is ready to begin selling screen. Qualcomm said they wont be manufacturing E-Readers themselves, but are working to supply OEM partners who want an alternative to e-ink and LCD technologies. Mirasol’s technolgy, with its lower power, high color, and fast refresh rate, shows that it can be used in any number of devices. Mirasol’s technology  is faster than the current technology which users have complained take up to two seconds to change a page, which is not an issue with the Mirasol.

Qualcomm has commercialized the technology in a number of portable electronic devices, under the trademark name “mirasol”. The Qualcomm Mirasol Team has confirmed a mirasol-based unit, which is a 5.7 inch display  panel and it is expected in fall 2010.  At this point they won’t reveal who exactly will be using this display panel. Who will get the 5.7 inch, 1024 x768 display screen is still unknown. Many believe that Amazon will use the 5.7 inch Mirasol dispay to create the Amazon Kindle 3. Qualcomm is also working on a 10 inch display that will most likely it will enter the market after the 5.7 inch model. Who will get the 10 inch model is another question too.

The Screen
Like the E Ink display, it is visible even in bright sunlight. screen is colorful and retains visibility when viewed at different angles. LCD screens wash out and are difficult to see or read under direct sunlight, no matter how strong the backlight is and can be hard on the eyes. Since Mirasol displays use reflective mirrored surfaces, they’re easier to see in bright/outdoor conditions because they reflect light out. It uses a process that works similar to butterfly wings, by changing the wavelengths of light it reflects back different colors to the human eye. Qualcomm’s marketing director Cheryl Goodman said the Mirasol uses  a reflective technique comparable to the prismatic effect created when a diamond is held up to a light. The screen’s refresh rate of up to 24 frames per second is good enough for almost every other kind of video. Each mirror can change color but it’s a passive screen, with no backlight (like most LCDs) and no self-illumination (as OLED). They get lit up by whatever light is in the room. In complete darkness, where you would need to activate the backlight on an LCD, Mirasol displays use a small, energy friendly front light. Cheryl Goodman elaborates that even in dim conditions, Mirasol displays appear as clear as they would under bright lighting conditions because they are like paper, a very efficient reflector of light.

“Mirasol does color well but it has difficulty in reproducing gray scales,” says Jakhanwal. “When it comes to black-and-white, it is not as high contrast as an E Ink screen, but the advantage Qualcomm has is that it can offer color now.” The display is full color with elements that reflect in red, green, and blue wavelengths, based on the difference in phase caused by reflection between the two plates. Mirasol does the same thing, except with light. “Black” is actually ultraviolet, which is not visible to most human eyes. They use the ambient light in the environment to generate color.

According to Qualcomm, the technology has two conductive plates: one a thin film stack on a glass substrate, the other a reflective membrane suspended over the substrate.Normally it’s clear. When a voltage is applied, the plates are pulled together by electrostatic attraction and the element turns black. And because the two plates are so close together, this can happen very fast. Once it’s changed…well, let’s let Qualcomm explain it: “The bi-stability of Mirasol displays comes from the inherent hysteresis derived from the technology’s electro-mechanical properties — the inherent imbalance between the linear restorative forces of the mechanical membrane and the non-linear forces of the applied electric field.”

The Technology Of The Mirasol

Mirasol is a technology under development by Qualcomm’s MEMS Technologies division. Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology to imitate the way butterfly wings shimmer – a process called biomimetics, or imitating things found in nature using tiny moving reflective surface to change color states. This MEMS–based innovation is both bistable, meaning it is both extremely low power, and highly reflective, meaning the display itself can be seen even in direct sunlight.
Mirasol displays are interferometric modulator displays (IMODs).  IMODs are example of MEM’s. Mirasol uses IMOD (Interferometric MODulation) technology with Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) technology at its core.  Essentially, two conductive plates are used to create the colors in the display.  The bottom plate has a “thin film stack” on its glass while the other plate has a “highly reflective membrane.”  Between the two plates is an air gap.  Changing the size of the gap changes the color that you see.With each pixel in an IMOD is individually addressed, similar to the way an LCD works. In each IMOD pixel a minuscule interferometric cavity, made up of a reflective membrane and a thin-film stack, either reflects light or not depending on the state of the membrane. The IMOD elements are tiny, “10 –100 microns to a side” or “400 to 1,000 dots per inch”.  Voltage applied to the plates causes the air gaps in each tiny IMOD element to change, creating words, and color images that change fluidly from one instant to the next. IMOD pixels require little power except when their state is being changed. This makes IMODs more energy efficient than LCD-type displays. Because IMODs are reflective displays, they actually become brighter when there is more ambient light.
Compared To E Ink / E paper

Unlike the more common E Ink style electrophoretic technology, they don’t have to worry as much about screen refresh time, or applying filters to create the illusion of color. A lot of the companies that have added color filters to the existing technology get even slower refresh rates and this keeps e-paper solely in the domain of e-readers and simple flashing advertisements. This is the main reason e-paper hasn’t found a lot of uses other than text-based rendering, it’s too slow to support anything else. E-Ink doesn’t refresh fast enough to do video playback. Mirasol battery is believed to last 18% longer than e-ink, 7.3 days for e-ink compared to 8.6 days for Mirasol.

Power Consumption

Using a Mirasol display rather than an LCD display means an energy savings of about 33.7 percent.  That increases the battery life by 51 percent.  This mean 58 fewer recharge cycles and would “increase the life of the battery by 1.25 years.”  Overall, using a Mirasol display would result in a 94 percent reduction in carbon dioxide. Saving energy is the key here, anytime you eliminate a light source, you cut way down on the juice. Its pixels, like E Ink’s, are bistable, so it will draw power only when refreshing the screen. Every time a button is pushed on a mobile phone with a typical LCD display, whether a person is dialing, sending a text message, turning on the digital music player or surfing the Internet: the display backlight illuminates and uses energy. It can offer at least five times the battery life of a 6-inch Kindle black-and-white Kindle display.