Marvell, E Ink to deliver new generation of faster, lower power ultra thin eReaders

SANTA CLARA, USA: Marvell, a world leader in storage, communications, and consumer silicon solutions, recently announced its collaboration with E Ink, the supplier of electronic paper display (EPD) technologies for most of the world's eReaders.

The two companies have begun to ship a highly integrated eReader processor available in complete turnkey platforms aimed at the fast-growing eReader market. These new platforms are expected to accelerate the rapid release of new forms of eReaders at a variety of price points.

"With this announcement, Marvell raises the technology bar and takes the lead in the eReader market," said Ms. Weili Dai, Marvell's Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of the Company's Consumer and Computing Business Unit at Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.

"Because this is a total platform solution – including Marvell key technologies such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G modem, and power management – the ARMADA eReader has the potential to deliver the first mass market product accessible and affordable to billions of consumers around the world. Marvell's passion is to give consumers more choice, improved features, and greater access to more information with eReaders that are aimed at education, health, and business applications."

As one of the fastest growing consumer markets, eReaders continue to grow in popularity due to falling retail prices, improved features, and fast growing library of digital content. According to a recent iSuppli Research report, eReaders are projected to top 18 million units shipped in 2012, from 1.1 million units last year.

"Our collaboration with Marvell will deliver an integrated System-on-a-Chip (SoC) solution to the market," said Sriram Peruvemba, Vice President of Marketing at E Ink. "This SoC solution is aimed at offering highly desired features at competitive price points."

Marvell and E Ink have been working together and co-developing products for the ePaper market. The recently signed agreement between E Ink and Marvell includes joint development and cross licensing of next generation ePaper timing controllers and system platforms, which the companies anticipate will result in higher integration and lower cost solutions for eReader manufacturers.

Central to this new eReader platform is the world's first commercially available SoC that integrates a high performance processor and state of the art EPD controller on a single chip — the Marvell ARMADA 166E application processor.

The ARMADA 166E is designed to offer users ultra fast renderings of high resolution PDF documents and support for the latest ePaper technologies in new smaller, slimmer form factors with lower system cost than the competition. The ARMADA 166E also brings to eReaders new features that save power and extend battery life including a unique hibernation mode, or zero power mode.

The two companies have also joined forces with FirstPaper, LLC, to integrate unique technology into the ARMADA 166E. This joint innovation enables a range of display sizes and resolutions, including support for larger screens that will deliver layouts, graphics, and content choices that people normally associate with periodicals, larger-format books, and documents.

"Periodicals are the next big frontier in eReading," said Gil Fuchsberg, President of FirstPaper, which will bring a new eReading ecosystem to market in 2010. "To enable great newspaper and magazine reading experiences, eReading devices need the right tools to make richer layouts and complex content come to life. We're excited to be working with Marvell to bring such tools to the market."

Device manufacturers will be able to take full advantage of FirstPaper's integrated content and commerce platform with the ARMADA 166E.

Customer support
Customers have sampled and integrated the Marvell ARMADA and E Ink based eReader platforms into their end solutions — consumer ready eReaders are expected to be available to end-users in 2010.

"The enTourage eDGe is the industry's first dualbook, combining an E Ink reader with a netbook, notepad and audio/video player and recorder into one central device," said Asghar Mostafa, President and CEO of enTourage Systems.

"The ARMADA 166E gives the enTourage eDGe the power it needs to meet people's multiple, yet simultaneous digital needs, at an attractive price point within reach of all consumers."

"Marvell's support was a key enabler in Plastic Logic's development of a high performance eReader to meet the needs of business professionals," said Frank Canova, VP Product Engineering for Plastic Logic. "Plastic Logic plans to unveil the category's first proReader on January 7 at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show."

"During our development of the Alex Reader — a dual screen eReader that incorporates both E Ink for high contrast eReading, and color LCD screen for multimedia playback and enhanced web browsing, Marvell was the clear choice," noted Albert Teng, Founder and CTO at Spring Design. "We needed a processor that could run Android while delivering outstanding multimedia performance."