9.5L: Late‐News Paper: Scalable Sequential‐Color Display Without ASICs

Abstract

A new microdisplay backplane architecture integrating digital frame buffers and pulse-width-modulation gray-scale drivers eliminates external electronics in sequential-color single-panel projection systems while lowering power and bandwidth, permitting scalability to high resolutions. It delivers 256 gray levels per color with a native gamma characteristic programmable to values from one to greater than two.

70.1: LED‐Illuminated Pico Projector Architectures

“…Displaytech's FLCOS panels provide the fast switching needed for single-panel sequential color, without the usual electronicsystem complexity associated with re-ordering standard video data [3]. Table 1 shows optical throughput measurements, as described in Section 6, for early engineering samples of Displaytech's LV-SVGA panel.…”

“…Separate companion projectors, with their own batteries but that connect to mobile platforms, will have intermediate size and light output. Single-panel, sequentialcolor engines enabled by fast-switching ferroelectric-liquidcrystal-on-silicon (FLCOS) panels provide an attractive basis for pico projectors [2], offering high optical efficiency and an ultracompact low-power electronic system [3]. In this paper we present exemplary optical architectures based on LED color-sequential illumination of a single FLCOS microdisplay panel, some targeted for each of the battery-powered embedded, companion, and standalone segments.…”

“…The FLCOS panel employs pulse width modulation[3]: all pixels are written ON at the beginning of each field, with the illumination held off for a blanking time (line 13) slightly longer than the FLC response time (line 14) to allow black pixels to attain their OFF state. For DC balance current FLCOS panels require 50% of the duty cycle be devoted to an inverse image with illumination blanked, resulting in the net LED…”

52.2: Display with Arbitrary Primary Spectra

“…The display proposed here is an extension of FSC displays in which the light integration takes place separately for each field or subfield (digital greyscale), with constant image data shown on the display during the integration period (primary source superposition). Field-wise [9,10] and subfield-wise [15] superposition has been proposed but the time-integrated spectra were limited to a linear combination of the spectra of three light sources (LEDs). Although the display chromaticites are adjustable, continuous, smooth primary spectra could not be synthesized.…”

Bistable FLCOS devices for doubled‐brightness micro‐projectors

“…Ferroelectric liquid crystal on silicon (FLCOS) microdisplays [1] have found widespread near-to-eye application, with more than 18 million units supplied for use as electronic viewfinders in camcorders and digital cameras. Fast FLC switching enables high quality color-sequential images without color-filter triads, while integration of system functions within the VLSI backplane simplifies product design [1]. Pico-projectors small enough to be embedded in mobile phones or personal digital assistants also benefit from the small size and low power consumption of FLCOS microdisplays [2].…”