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Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

pubs.acs.org

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Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#21

Post by baybal2 »

robinsoh wrote: post #17
benrbray wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a horse in this race, but I have often heard in these threads the rumor that the reason the Remarkable E-Ink tablet cannot be fully open-source is due to restrictive licenses for the E-ink technology they use. Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing technology in their hands but are not free to use it to its full potential, as the actual Remarkable software is pretty…

> but I have often heard in these threads the rumor that the reason the Remarkable E-Ink tablet cannot be fully open-source is due to restrictive licenses for the E-ink technology they use. isn't the founder of Remarkable an HN user? I am interested to knoww for sure if this is a fact. Is EInk is violating on infringing upon the GPL? > Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing tech…

> When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable

Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#22

Post by jcims »

T-A wrote: post #20

> based on tungsten trioxide, gold, and a thin platinum mirror Gold is currently 58 USD/gram, platinum 36 USD/gram. How much would be needed for a display?

These are thin films and the material cost is going to be relatively low. From the paper:

>We found that platinum was ideal as broadband back-reflector, while 20 nm gold was still ideal color-wise for the semitransparent nanohole layer.

A one square meter sheet that's 20nm thick would require about .02 cubic centimeters of material to cover. For gold that's ~.4g or $23 worth at the price you've listed.

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#23

Post by daniel_reetz »

robinsoh wrote: post #18
b112 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found the eink employee. Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such. I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there is a patent, and it is licensed, but at exhobrinant cost. Thus, eink is "too expensive" for true derivative innovation, and even widespread sale. You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. In high school economics, we learned of min/max pricing th…

> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people. > Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale b…

As a fellow display engineer, thank you.

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#24

Post by robinsoh »

baybal2 wrote: post #21
robinsoh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but I have often heard in these threads the rumor that the reason the Remarkable E-Ink tablet cannot be fully open-source is due to restrictive licenses for the E-ink technology they use. isn't the founder of Remarkable an HN user? I am interested to knoww for sure if this is a fact. Is EInk is violating on infringing upon the GPL? > Basically people are upset (understandably) that they're holding this amazing tech…

> When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

> > When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable

> Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

I hope you can see the main part where I specifically stated we are talking about electrophoresis only. If you want to start including interferometry then that's a different topic. There's sadly, good reasons why Qualcomm killed Mirasol. But that's another story for another day.

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#25

Post by derefr »

robinsoh wrote: post #18
b112 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Found the eink employee. Kidding! You do make some interesting points re: licensing and patents and such. I think the complaint I hear leveled, is that there is a patent, and it is licensed, but at exhobrinant cost. Thus, eink is "too expensive" for true derivative innovation, and even widespread sale. You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. In high school economics, we learned of min/max pricing th…

> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people. > Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale b…

The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like yours!) would be competitively iterating on electrophoretic display-panel technology in the process of manufacturing their own to sell into the market (either vertically-integrated, or as panel wholesalers), the same way they competitively iterate on LCD and LED-based display panel technologies; and that this would presumably produce market efficiencies that aren’t currently there.

There could also be vertically-integrated niche panel+display companies focusing on niche use-cases, targeting a given vertical and doing “market education” for that vertical, creating demand for e.g. electrophoretic billboards, that isn’t currently there, “inventing the market” for themselves where each of these niches can eventually be a high-volume product of its own.

And that would in turn drive additional innovation, as each of these companies would have a healthy margin to plow back into R&D.

I think the intuitional belief behind this is that the blocking factor from this virtuous cycle beginning, is the fact that the entrepreneurs considering starting these niche companies, and the display bigcorps considering getting into this space, both consider that — when per-device patent licensing costs are included — the market is too low-margin to bother entering, even to chase a greenfield vertical. It only becomes “worth it” without the licensing fees.

People’s intuition for this probably leans on analogies like the market for CPU innovation heating up again now that Apple has got away from relying on Intel and is producing their own CPUs. People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#27

Post by robinsoh »

derefr wrote: post #25
robinsoh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You might do better to speak to that accusation directly. That's the thing. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the accusation is. So far, every time I've challenged comments made about this, people have been vague and unwilling to state anything verifiable. To be frank, I don't even think any of the people making those comments are actually display people. > Maybe the eink lads believe the tech can never scale b…

The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like…

> The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself

They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

> so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.”

I don't understand why someone would believe that, especially people who aren't involved in the industry. As I mentioned, it would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines and that Microsoft is strangling the market for innovation in operating systems. Although now that I think deeper about the line about Microsoft, maybe Microsoft is doing that? Is that why desktop Linux has not progressed at all and remains unusable?

> People would intuit that if display manufacturers could “get away from eInk” and “produce their own electrophoretic panels”, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” market would “heat up.”

Eink is considered a niche player in my industry. It would be the equivalent of perhaps a ultralowpower CPU manufacturer in the CPU industry. In my opinion, the “low energy use, readable-in-daylight panel” is not going to happen using electrophoretics because the physics of the problem is too challenging. In my opinion, the main reason why nothing is really happening there is because doing fundamental research on display technologies is expensive. Bezos spent hundreds of millions on Liquavista before he killed it, I'm pretty sure Qualcomm spent a lot on Mirasol. The problem is VCs don't want to invest in hard problems. They can get a quicker return from yet another internet service, AI/ML, another airbnb, another uber, another payment gateway and so on.

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#29

Post by derefr »

robinsoh wrote: post #27
derefr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself; and so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” They believe that, without those patents (or if those patents were instead in the public domain), companies that produce traditional display panels (like…

> The explicit accusation, AFAICT, is that eInk holds certain patent(s) which cannot be avoided if you want to produce an electrophoretic-technology display panel yourself They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business. > so people believe eInk are, through these patents, “strangling the market for innovation.” I…

> They don't hold such a patent, at least as far as I know. Which is presumably how their competitors like ClearInk, Reinkstone are able to be in business.

They do seem to hold rather a lot of patents (https://patents.justia.com/assignee/e-ink-corporation), though I don't have the domain knowledge to know whether any of these are "unavoidable" in the domain in the way that e.g. software engineering process patents tend to be.

Perhaps their competitors actually license some of them? Or are in a patent pooling arrangement?

> It would be the equivalent of me believing that Google was strangling the market of innovation in search engines

I mean, with the PageRank patent, they... sort of were?

Nobody could come up with anything nearly as optimal as Google's approach for a long time, let alone more optimal; the next-best algorithms were way less good. And so we didn't see any real Google Search competitors — competitors competing on index quality against Google — after Google came into the market. (There's still nobody with a better raw index than Google's, AFAIK.)

The original PageRank patent expired in 2015. A lot of advancement in the search space happened in 2015! Bing got a lot better, for one. Guess why? :)

(Of course, companies that were somewhat immune to America's WIPO power — e.g. the government-backed conglomerates of China/Russia — have just been using PageRank or algorithms analogous to it in their web search services since the beginning. It was only the, er, NATO-member-country web-search-engine market that effectively stalled out.)

Re: Electrochromic nanostructures with high chromaticity and superior brightness

#30

Post by faeyanpiraat »

robinsoh wrote: post #24
baybal2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours.

> > When you say "good enough for movie watching", I'll say that'll never ever happen with electrophoresis. You can't violate physics. Either a pigment particle moves slowly and stably or it moves fast and is unstable > Do you remember mirasol display? You don't necessarily need pigments to produce colours. I hope you can see the main part where I specifically stated we are talking about electrophoresis only. If you…

Is it just a long story or you have an NDA?
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