Research Of Framebuffer Driver Design For Embedded Electronic Paper

With the development of embedded systems, the monitors for embedded devices also upgrade continuously from CRT to LCD and then electronic papers which appear in recent years. Electronic paper, which has a lot of advantages, such as low power consumption, high-contrast, large viewing angle and being readable under bright light, will play an important role in the next generation of embedded device.As a bridge between display device and operating system, display driver means a lot to the development of embedded display device. This paper does an intense research on the structure and developing procedure of Linux framebuffer driver and also the functions and principle of the EPD controller. How to design and implement a framebuffer driver for electronic paper with EPD controller is studied in the view of platform device and platform driver. This research work grounds on the support of framebuffer driver for Broadsheet AM300 prototype kit in Linux kernel 2.6.29. Some improved solutions are given to the problems of not being able to display images clearly and strong flash when there is any update of the display which are debugged and verified by establishing system development environment. The work done in this paper lays a technical foundation for developing commercial display devices based on electronic paper in future.