Memjet plans to provide pigmented inks for specialized applications. However, the main focus is on advanced dyes. With recent advances in dye chemistry, dyes are now suitable for almost all applications. The lightfastness of dyes used in Memjet inks exceeds that of many pigments.

Memjet inks are water based so that they are compatible with an office environment.

Memjet plans to provide inks for specialized applications such as UV-cured inks, solvent-based inks, pigmented inks and so on.

In the case of a Memjet office printer, a typical home/office PC (e.g. 2 GHz Pentium with 256 MB of RAM) is able to print most user documents at full speed and full quality.

SoPEC is single chip printing solution for Memjet printers. It provides all of the digital electronics needed in an A4 / Letter or dedicated photo printer, allowing Memjet printers to be cost competitive in their respective markets.

SoPEC is a 40 million transistor chip implemented in a 0.13 micron CMOS process with copper interconnect and embedded DRAM.

The data bandwidth requirement is very high, necessitating an on-chip high speed memory connection that is 128 bits wide.

A single SoPEC can directly drive the Memjet printhead at 900 million ink drops per second. This provides A4 / Letter printing at 30 pages per minute at a true 1600 x 1600 dpi resolution. For high quality business color printing, 1600 dpi x 800 dpi is adequate.

Yes--it is very straightforward to design a printer with more than one SoPEC. A two SoPEC printer can provide A4 / Letter printing at 120 pages per minute. SoPEC can be scaled further, as is evidenced by the wide format reference design, which uses 6 SoPEC's to drive 422,400 nozzles, and can print up to the equivalent of 360 A4 ppm.

SoPEC can support MFP's and AIO's with the addition of an external processing and memory to drive image scanning and communications functions. Silverbrook Research is developing a single chip solution for MFP's and AIO's which incorporates SoPEC functionality.