Samsung acquires LCD firm Liquavista

In 2006, Liquavista raised a total of €12m in funding from a consortium including Amadeus, GIMV and New Venture Partners. A further €8m was given in series B funding in 2008, and an additional €7m in April 2010, which was aimed at accelerating the commercialisation of the company's next generation LCD 2.0 display. In May 2010, the company announced a collaboration with Freescale Semiconductor to develop platforms for next generation eReader devices utilising Freescale's i.MX51 processor. The company's electrowetting technology, which operates in transmissive, reflective, transparent and transflective modes, enables the creation of displays with bright, colourful images with reduced power consumption. Offering more than twice the transmittance of lcd technology and able to operate at low frequencies, displays utilising electrowetting consume just 10% of the battery power of existing display technologies. With the acquisition, Samsung aims to expand its presence in next generation display technologies by applying the technology in ePaper and transparent displays. "As electrowetting can be manufactured by modifying existing lcd production lines, Samsung aims to realise significant synergies through the utilisation of existing manufacturing equipment and capabilities," the company said in statement. "In ePaper applications, the response time of the electrowetting displays will be more than 70 times faster than that of existing reflective displays, allowing for colour videos, which was previously thought impossible." Samsung expects the application of the technology to expand to transparent, transmissive and transflective displays.