Genoa reduces mobile power consumption

Genoa Color Technologies has spent the last nine years improving the color on LCD televisions but is now refocusing its efforts on the mobile market, where screen sizes and battery drain are on the rise. The optical amplifier maker today introduced its Pixcale technology to address the challenges of delivering longer battery life and vivid TV-quality color on high-resolution mobile phone displays.

Israel-based Genoa’s patented multi-primary technology can reduce phone displays’ power consumption by 40% without incurring any additional costs, according to Chief Executive Officer Ilan Ben-David. The company has looked into the mobile market in the past, but the dynamics have never before been ripe for its technology, he said. For Pixcale to be a zero-cost addition to mobile phones – critical in today’s market, it requires handsets with a relatively large screen and high enough resolution. Ben-David estimated that approximately half of phones today meet Genoa’s resolution requirements, but the rest are moving in this direction.

Pixcale works through filters and algorithms based on a color palette of red, green, blue, cyan and yellow. The technology can be implemented with minimal disruption to the core phone display as it just takes changing the color filter and adjusting the display’s algorithms. The result is a more vivid, bright and natural display of a phone’s media content.

As it is today, the display module of a mobile phone consumes 50% of the typical smartphone’s power budget, according to Genoa. By implementing Pixcale, handset makers can also realize 35% to 50% backlight power savings, helping carriers market applications and letting consumers enjoy them longer. The added color filters represent only 4% of the total cost of Genoa’s solution, so the cost to manufacturers is negligible, according to Ben-David. “You are now riding the economy-of-scale train from the start,” he said.

A problem many technology vendors have run into when selling to handset manufacturers is that they are reluctant to work outside of their existing supply chain. Ben-David said that by licensing its technology out, handset makers can stick with the suppliers and vendors they are familiar with. As a technology already proven in LCD TVs, he said business model concerns were more pressing than the technology itself.

“We understood that in this market, sometimes the supply chain is more important than the technology,” Ben-David said. “Having an established supply chain with several vendors is key to bringing the technology at the right cost…The technology is nice, but from the other side, we looked carefully into the licensing model and how we should license that.”

Every cent counts in this hyper-competitive space, agreed Chris Crotty, director of small-and-medium displays at DisplaySearch, an NPD Group company. A technology like Genoa’s, while new, is important to consumers as they spend more time with their phone display turned on for non-communication functions, like web browsing and entertainment, he said. Large screen, software-driven smartphones are the most obvious candidate for the technology, but high-end multimedia handsets would also benefit from the power savings, he said. In general, all displays are growing in size with higher pixel counts and great power drain. Crotty anticipates Genoa will be welcomed in the market, although potentially challenged by its outsider status.

“It is always challenging bringing any new technology into a very structured and existing supply chain like the
mobile phone market,” Crotty said. “Your typical start-up could have a great new technology for mobile phones, but how do they get it into the market? How do they get new companies to listen to them and get partners to produce products? It takes time to build their relationships and prove it’s a viable solution. Until now, Genoa had been looking at positioning their solution on the TV side, but it’s making a switch now.”