Optical teardown of a Kindle Paperwhite display by OCT

Abstract

An optical teardown, or reverse engineering, of an Amazon Kindle Paperwhite electrophoretic display was performed by Optical Coherence Tomography at 1060 nm. The display incorporates an optical diffuser, lightguide and scattering layers for white light illumination, capacitive touch sensing, and an electrophoretic display. All these layers can be imaged by OCT as well as the thin film transistor array on the back side for driving the pixels. Phase sensitive OCT is used to measure motion of the pigment particles as the display changes between black and white.