Gyricon

Last updated
A roll of Gyricon. Gyricon enrollado.jpg
A roll of Gyricon.

Gyricon is a type of electronic paper developed at the Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). It has many of the same properties as paper: it is flexible, contains an image, and is viewable from a wide angle, but it can be erased and written thousands of times.

A scheme of Gyricon beads rotating. Bolas de gyricon.jpg
A scheme of Gyricon beads rotating.

A Gyricon sheet is a thin layer of transparent plastic, in which millions of small beads, somewhat like toner particles, are randomly dispersed. The beads, each contained in an oil-filled cavity, are free to rotate within those cavities. The beads are "bichromal", with hemispheres of two contrasting colors (e.g. black and white, red and white), and charged, so they exhibit an electrical dipole. When voltage is applied to the surface of the sheet, the beads rotate to present one colored side to the viewer. Voltages can be applied to the surface to create images such as text and pictures. The image will persist until new voltage patterns are applied [1]

As of December, 2005, Xerox closed down the direct subsidiary Gyricon LLC, their Gyricon e-paper display business, and is focusing on licensing the technology. The company have said that the reason for their closure has been their inability to source backplane technology for their Gyricon frontplane at a price of less than $10 per square foot (US$100/m2). Being able to achieve a price of under $10 was said to be critical to the success of marketing their e-paper-based electronic signage products. Although the company will stop direct manufacture and sale of Gyricon e-paper display products, it will, however, still be licensing their frontplane technology to other users. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Printer (computing)</span> Computer peripheral that prints text or graphics

In computing, a printer is a peripheral machine which makes a persistent representation of graphics or text, usually on paper. While most output is human-readable, bar code printers are an example of an expanded use for printers. Different types of printers include 3D printers, inkjet printers, laser printers, and thermal printers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic paper</span> Paper like display technology

Electronic paper, also sometimes electronic ink, e-ink or electrophoretic display, are display devices that mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper. Unlike conventional flat panel displays that emit light, an electronic paper display reflects ambient light like paper. This may make them more comfortable to read, and provide a wider viewing angle than most light-emitting displays. The contrast ratio in electronic displays available as of 2008 approaches newspaper, and newly (2008) developed displays are slightly better. An ideal e-paper display can be read in direct sunlight without the image appearing to fade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Liquid-crystal display</span> Display that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals

A liquid-crystal display (LCD) is a flat-panel display or other electronically modulated optical device that uses the light-modulating properties of liquid crystals combined with polarizers. Liquid crystals do not emit light directly but instead use a backlight or reflector to produce images in color or monochrome. LCDs are available to display arbitrary images or fixed images with low information content, which can be displayed or hidden. For instance: preset words, digits, and seven-segment displays, as in a digital clock, are all good examples of devices with these displays. They use the same basic technology, except that arbitrary images are made from a matrix of small pixels, while other displays have larger elements. LCDs can either be normally on (positive) or off (negative), depending on the polarizer arrangement. For example, a character positive LCD with a backlight will have black lettering on a background that is the color of the backlight, and a character negative LCD will have a black background with the letters being of the same color as the backlight. Optical filters are added to white on blue LCDs to give them their characteristic appearance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xerox</span> American document management corporation

Xerox Holdings Corporation is an American corporation that sells print and digital document products and services in more than 160 countries. Xerox is headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, though it is incorporated in New York with its largest population of employees based around Rochester, New York, the area in which the company was founded. The company purchased Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in early 2010. As a large developed company, it is consistently placed in the list of Fortune 500 companies.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laser printing</span> Electrostatic digital printing process

Laser printing is an electrostatic digital printing process. It produces high-quality text and graphics by repeatedly passing a laser beam back and forth over a negatively charged cylinder called a "drum" to define a differentially charged image. The drum then selectively collects electrically charged powdered ink (toner), and transfers the image to paper, which is then heated to permanently fuse the text, imagery, or both, to the paper. As with digital photocopiers, laser printers employ a xerographic printing process. Laser printing differs from traditional xerography as implemented in analog photocopiers in that in the latter, the image is formed by reflecting light off an existing document onto the exposed drum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Multi-function printer</span> Office machine

An MFP, multi-functional, all-in-one (AIO), or multi-function device (MFD), is an office machine which incorporates the functionality of multiple devices in one, so as to have a smaller footprint in a home or small business setting, or to provide centralized document management/distribution/production in a large-office setting. A typical MFP may act as a combination of some or all of the following devices: email, fax, photocopier, printer, scanner.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fujifilm</span> Japanese conglomerate started as photographic film manufacturer

Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, trading as Fujifilm, or simply Fuji, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, operating in the realms of photography, optics, office and medical electronics, biotechnology, and chemicals.

Liquid crystal on silicon is a miniaturized reflective active-matrix liquid-crystal display or "microdisplay" using a liquid crystal layer on top of a silicon backplane. It is also referred to as a spatial light modulator. LCoS was initially developed for projection televisions but is now used for wavelength selective switching, structured illumination, near-eye displays and optical pulse shaping. By way of comparison, some LCD projectors use transmissive LCD, allowing light to pass through the liquid crystal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xerography</span> Dry photocopying technique

Xerography is a dry photocopying technique. Originally called electrophotography, it was renamed xerography—from the Greek: [n] roots ξηρόςxeros, meaning "dry" and -γραφία-graphia, meaning "writing"—to emphasize that unlike reproduction techniques then in use such as cyanotype, the process of xerography used no liquid chemicals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Field-emission display</span>

A field-emission display (FED) is a flat panel display technology that uses large-area field electron emission sources to provide electrons that strike colored phosphor to produce a color image. In a general sense, an FED consists of a matrix of cathode ray tubes, each tube producing a single sub-pixel, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. FEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast levels and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat-panel technologies. They also offer the possibility of requiring less power, about half that of an LCD system. FEDs can also be made transparent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Surface-conduction electron-emitter display</span> CRT screen

A surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) is a display technology for flat panel displays developed by a number of companies. SEDs use nanoscopic-scale electron emitters to energize colored phosphors and produce an image. In a general sense, a SED consists of a matrix of tiny cathode-ray tubes, each "tube" forming a single sub-pixel on the screen, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. SEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast ratios, wide viewing angles, and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat panel displays. They also use much less power than an LCD television of the same size.

DocuShare is a content management system developed by Xerox Corporation. DocuShare makes use of open standards and allows for managing content, integrating it with other business systems, and developing customized and packaged software applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E Ink</span> Electronic paper manufactured by E Ink Corporation

E Ink is a brand of electronic paper (e-paper) display technology commercialized by the E Ink Corporation, which was co-founded in 1997 by MIT undergraduates JD Albert and Barrett Comiskey, MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson, Jerome Rubin and Russ Wilcox.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flexible display</span> Type of computer monitor

A flexible display or rollable display is an electronic visual display which is flexible in nature, as opposed to the traditional flat screen displays used in most electronic devices. In recent years there has been a growing interest from numerous consumer electronics manufacturers to apply this display technology in e-readers, mobile phones and other consumer electronics. Such screens can be rolled up like a scroll without the image or text being distorted. Technologies involved in building a rollable display include electronic ink, Gyricon, Organic LCD, and OLED.

Laser color television, or laser color video display, is a type of television that utilizes two or more individually modulated optical (laser) rays of different colors to produce a combined spot that is scanned and projected across the image plane by a polygon-mirror system or less effectively by optoelectronic means to produce a color-television display. The systems work either by scanning the entire picture a dot at a time and modulating the laser directly at high frequency, much like the electron beams in a cathode ray tube, or by optically spreading and then modulating the laser and scanning a line at a time, the line itself being modulated in much the same way as with digital light processing (DLP).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Electronic shelf label</span> Shelf labels that use e-ink or LCD displays instead of paper

An electronic shelf label (ESL) system is used by retailers for displaying product pricing on shelves. The product pricing is automatically updated whenever a price is changed under the control of a central server. Typically, electronic display modules are attached to the front edge of retail shelving.

Orbotech Ltd. a subsidiary of KLA Corporation and a technology company used in the manufacturing of consumer and industrial products throughout the electronics and adjacent industries. The company providing electronics reading, writing, and connecting solutions used by manufacturers of printed circuit boards, flat panel displays, advanced packaging, micro-electro-mechanical systems and other electronic components. The company is headquartered in Yavne, Israel and operates in North America, Europe, Japan and Asia-Pacific.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Photocopier</span> Device for reproducing documents

A photocopier is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers use a technology called xerography, a dry process that uses electrostatic charges on a light-sensitive photoreceptor to first attract and then transfer toner particles onto paper in the form of an image. The toner is then fused onto the paper using heat, pressure, or a combination of both. Copiers can also use other technologies, such as inkjet, but xerography is standard for office copying.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital micromirror device</span>

The digital micromirror device, or DMD, is the microoptoelectromechanical system (MOEMS) that is the core of the trademarked DLP projection technology from Texas Instruments (TI). Texas Instrument's DMD was created by solid-state physicist and TI Fellow Emeritus Dr. Larry Hornbeck in 1987. However, the technology goes back to 1973 with Harvey C. Nathanson's use of millions of microscopically small moving mirrors to create a video display of the type now found in digital projectors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Toppan</span> Japanese printing company

Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. or simply Toppan is a Japanese global printing company. Toppan was founded in 1900 and is headquartered in Tokyo.

References

  1. Gyricon project description Archived 2005-10-24 at the Wayback Machine
  2. Brian HAMILTON (2005-12-15). "Xerox erases electronic paper subsidiary, Gyricon LLC, in Scio Twp". Ann Arbor Business Review. Everything Michigan. Archived from the original on 2006-05-01. Retrieved 2007-12-28.