E-paper technology comes with its own vocabulary, and most of it doesn’t map cleanly onto terms from LCD or OLED displays. If you’re evaluating e-paper for a signage, labeling, or embedded project, this glossary covers the terms you’ll see most often — what they mean, why they matter, and how they affect what you can actually build.
Bistable Display
A bistable display is a screen that holds its image without any continuous power supply. Once the display shows an image, that image physically stays in place — the pixels don’t need to be “refreshed” or powered to remain visible. Power is only drawn at the moment the content changes.
This is the single property that separates e-paper from LCD and OLED. An LCD needs constant backlight power to stay visible; an e-paper display showing the same content for a week draws essentially zero power during that week. It’s why e-paper signage can run for months on a small battery, and why e-paper price tags and wayfinding signs keep displaying correctly even during a power outage.
Refresh Rate (and Refresh Modes)
Refresh rate in e-paper doesn’t mean the same thing it does on a monitor spec sheet. E-paper isn’t measured in Hz for smooth motion — it’s measured in how long it takes, and how the panel behaves, when the image changes from one static state to another.
There are generally three refresh modes used in commercial e-paper products:
- Full refresh — the entire panel clears and redraws, which produces the cleanest image but is the slowest and briefly shows an inverted “flash.”
- Partial refresh — only the changed region of the screen redraws, which is faster and avoids the full-screen flash, at the cost of some ghosting over repeated updates.
- Fast refresh — an optimized mode built for near-real-time updates (such as counters or live status fields), trading some image quality for speed.
Choosing the right refresh mode is a real design decision, not just a spec to skim. A transit arrival board and an electronic shelf label have very different refresh needs, and panel/controller combinations that support flexible, region-specific refresh — including partial updates on non-rectangular areas — give integrators more control over that trade-off. MyGica’s color e-paper displays are built around this kind of flexible refresh control, which is worth understanding before you lock in a refresh strategy for your project.
Grayscale
Grayscale describes how many distinct shades between black and white a monochrome e-paper panel can display — commonly referenced as 2-bit (4 shades), 4-bit (16 shades), or higher. This is separate from resolution (pixel count) and separate from color: a monochrome panel with more grayscale levels can render smoother photos and finer text anti-aliasing, even though it’s still displaying in black, white, and gray only.
For text-heavy signage — price tags, schedules, document readers — grayscale depth matters less than resolution. For image-heavy content on a monochrome panel, higher grayscale levels make a noticeable difference in perceived quality.
TCON (Timing Controller)
The TCON, or timing controller, is the component that translates image data into the specific voltage sequences and timing an e-paper panel needs to actually update its pixels. It sits between the display driver/SDK and the panel itself, and it’s largely responsible for how fast a panel refreshes, how clean partial updates look, and whether a panel can do things like driving oddly-shaped or non-rectangular regions independently.
This is a part of the stack that’s easy to overlook when comparing panels on spec sheets alone, because two displays with identical panel specs can behave very differently depending on TCON design. It’s also where proprietary engineering tends to live — for example, MyGica’s own driver architecture handles flexible and partial refresh control at the TCON level rather than leaving it entirely to firmware, which is part of what separates off-the-shelf panel integration from a tuned end product. (For a deeper look at what this component does, see our full explainer on the TCON board; if you’re integrating a display yourself and need the board itself rather than a finished unit, we also offer standalone TCON mainboards.)
Note: “TCON” is sometimes used loosely alongside — or even folded into — the broader term “display controller,” since in some designs the timing controller is one function inside a larger controller chip. In practice, when someone says TCON, they mean the piece specifically responsible for panel timing and refresh behavior.
Driver IC
The driver IC is the chip that actually applies voltage to the panel’s electrodes — it’s the hardware that executes the instructions the TCON generates. If the TCON decides when and how a pixel should transition, the driver IC is what physically pushes the electrical signal that makes the pigment particles move.
The distinction matters when you’re troubleshooting or comparing panel-level specs: timing and sequencing issues usually trace back to the TCON or waveform data, while inconsistent voltage delivery or electrode-level defects point to the driver IC. On integrated e-paper modules, both are usually bundled and invisible to the end user — but on raw panel integration projects, they’re evaluated and sometimes sourced separately.
Waveform
A waveform is the specific sequence of voltage pulses applied to move an e-paper pixel from one state to another — essentially the “recipe” that tells the panel how to transition for a given refresh mode. Full refresh, partial refresh, and fast refresh aren’t just settings; each one runs a different waveform, and waveforms are also typically tuned per temperature range, since particle movement speed changes with temperature.
This is why refresh behavior isn’t purely a hardware spec — it’s also a software/calibration one. Panel manufacturers ship waveform data (often stored as a look-up table, or LUT, mapping input states to voltage sequences) alongside the panel, and getting this data right is a big part of what makes one integrator’s refresh performance noticeably better than another’s on ostensibly the same panel.
A Few More Terms Worth Knowing
- EPD (Electrophoretic Display): The broad technical term for the microcapsule-based e-paper technology most people mean when they say “e-ink” — charged pigment particles suspended in fluid, moved by an electric field.
- Reflective Display: Any display that works by reflecting ambient light rather than emitting its own (the category e-paper belongs to, along with ChLCD). This is why e-paper stays readable — and actually gets easier to read — in bright sunlight.
- Ghosting: Faint traces of a previous image left behind after a refresh, most common with partial-refresh sequences and reduced (but not eliminated) by periodic full refreshes.
- PPI (Pixels Per Inch): Standard resolution density measurement, same as other display types — relevant for text sharpness and image detail at close viewing distances.
Understanding these terms is usually the first step before comparing specific technologies — monochrome EPD, color EPD, and ChLCD each make different trade-offs around the concepts above, which is a natural next question once the vocabulary is clear.