University of Houston

Electrophoretic displays (EPDs) and organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs) are two key technologies used on mobile devices. We propose the design of an integrated hybrid display combining a transparent OLED (TOLED) and a low-power EPD, which is adaptive to show contents of a frame partially on either the TOLED or the EPD. A windows-based predictive model and a calibration algorithm on TOLED are introduced to decide how frame contents can be split between the two displays for achieving the best tradeoff between power reduction and user experiences. We also propose a design of mobile video playback for the hybrid displays. The proposed approach supports encoded video playback based on the update frequency of each block, which is exploited by the hybrid display controller to determine which display should be used to show a MPEG encoded block. A fast DCT-based heuristic algorithm is proposed to detect the changes between frames at block level with minimal computation cost. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid display can save up to 70% power with acceptable user experiences.