Samsung acquires Dutch display firm Liquavista

Samsung Electronics Co, the world leader in liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, today said that it had acquired Dutch display firm Liquavista BV, as the South Korean electronics seeks to expand in the next generation display technologies.

Samsung acquired Liquavista from GIMV NV, Belgium's biggest buyout company, in December last year. Both companies did not disclose the financial terms of the transaction.

Eindhoven, the Netherlands-based Liquavista, founded in 2006 as a spin-out from the Philips Research Labs, offers a new type of electronic display technology known as electrowetting for applications in e-readers, mobile phones, media players and other mobile devices.

The electrowetting technology, which operates in transmissive, reflective, transparent and transflective modes, enables the creation of displays with bright, colorful images with dramatically reduced power consumption. 

It offers more than twice the transmittance of LCD technology and able to operate at low frequencies, displays utilizing electrowetting consume just 10 per cent of the battery power of existing display technologies.

In e-paper 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. In future, the application of the technology is expected to expand to transparent, transmissive and transflective displays.

With the acquisition, Samsung aims to expand its leadership in next generation display technologies by pioneering the application of electrowetting in e-Paper and transparent displays. 

Since electrowetting can be manufactured by modifying existing LCD production lines, Samsung said that it will be able to realise significant synergies through the utilization of existing manufacturing equipment and capabilities.