Genoa Pixcale reduces power by 40pc for smartphone displays

HERZLIYA, ISRAEL: Genoa Color Technologies announced Pixcale technology to address the twin challenge of delivering longer battery life and vivid TV-quality color on high-resolution mobile phone displays.

The company’s customized implementation of its patented multi-primary technology lets mobile handset makers reduce the power consumed in phone displays by 40 percent, while providing improved image appearance, incurring virtually no increase in cost.

Genoa’s multi-primary technology, while new to the smartphone market, is already fully developed, proven, and implemented in digital projectors, and in numerous LCD TV panels.

“A steady increase in screen size and resolution, phone features, and mobile applications has placed progressively greater power demands on phone batteries. As such, the industry is facing an acute problem, desperately looking for ways to reduce mobile device power consumption,” said Ilan Ben-David, CEO of Genoa Color Technologies.

“By adopting our Pixcale technology, handset makers can improve the total battery life of a mobile device by 15 percent. This not only benefits service providers looking to monetize airtime, it also benefits end-user adopters of rich-media applications and content.”

"Genoa's solution has strong market potential for two key reasons. First, the company is targeting the fastest growing segments in the mobile phone market, i.e., smart phones and high end feature phones,” said Chris Crotty, Director, Small and Medium Displays, DisplaySearch. “Second, Genoa's solution is minimally disruptive to a supply chain that is sometimes resistant to technological advances."

The display module consumes 50% of the typical smartphone power budget, making such significant power reduction in the display module exceedingly attractive to handset makers. Genoa’s multi-primary technology offers a 35-50 percent backlight power savings in mobile device display modules. And because the added color filters represent only 4 percent of the total cost of Genoa’s solution, the cost impact to manufacturers is negligible.

Genoa’s multi-primary technology augments standard RGB displays with a richer color palette comprised of RGBCY (red, green, blue, cyan, and yellow), resulting in a more vivid and natural display of media content. The technology offers better brightness efficiency, through careful filter selection and through Genoa’s Pixcale algorithms. The result is improved image performance and ambient light viewing for mobile content consumers.

Pixcale is based on established LCD manufacturing processes. Genoa’s plans to license the Pixcale technology to handset makers, allowing them to access their existing supply chain of LCD manufacturers for the displays.