Disclosure: Some links on this page are monetized by the Skimlinks, Amazon, Rakuten Advertising, and eBay, affiliate programs, and Liliputing may earn a commission if you make a purchase after clicking on those links. All prices are subject to change, and this article only reflects the prices available at time of publication.
Chip maker MediaTek has become a major player in the smartphone, tablet, and Chromebook markets in recent years. And now it looks like the company wants to expand its presence in the eReader space as well.
Electronic paper display maker E Ink has announced it’s “strengthened its cooperation with MediaTek” to develop chips for eBook readers with E Ink displays.
The announcement is rather light on specifics, but notes that MediaTek’s chips could power devices with black and white or color E Ink displays.
MediaTek’s solutions for eReaders pair one of the company’s system-on-a-chip solutions designed for tablets with a hardware timing controller from Yuantai Technology.
One of the most interesting parts of the announcement were the details about MediaTek’s current solution for eReaders: the MT8113 processor. This is the chip used in Amazon’s Kindle Scribe device, which features a 10.3 inch E Ink display and support for pen input, but Amazon and MediaTek hadn’t previously shared many details about the processor.
According to E Ink’s press release, the MT8113 is a 12nm chip with a dual-core 2 GHz CPU, support for LPDDR4 memory, and integrated support for WiFi 5 and Bluetooth. In other words, it’s not all that powerful by tablet standards, but should offer decent performance for devices with E Ink displays, where long battery life is more of a priority than super-speedy response times.