MEMS pico projectors aim at mass market

by R. Colin Johnson, Contributing Editor
MEMS Investor Journal

Digital micro-mirrors could become the next mass market MEMS chip as pico projectors are built into a wide array of consumer products.

Today Texas Instruments (TI) leads with its MEMS digital light processing (DLP) chip for pico projectors. TI's main competition is liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) which is essentially a reflective LCD shrunk down to the size of a CMOS chip.  TI's DLP, however, benefits from a 20-year development lead on LCoS, over which time it sold over 20 million units for projection TVs and digital cinemas.

TI has also recently redesigned smaller, less expensive versions of its DLP chip sets, the latest of which is small enough for even the slimmest-line mobile phone.  DLP pico projectors are already available for LG's eXpo mobile phone for AT&T customers -- as a snap-on pico-projector accessory -- and Samsung has already built-in a pico projector to its W7900 for Korea, with the i8520 model slated for U.S. release later this year. 

The come-from-behind technology for pico projectors is scanning lasers using a single MEMS micro-mirror.  Microvision Inc. (Redmond, Wash.) recently introduced the world's first laser-based pico projector using its scanning MEMS micro-mirror technique.  A single MEMS micro-mirror is illuminated by red, blue and green lasers which change levels as the micro-mirror scans an image onto a screen.

Other scanning laser MEMS chip makers include Maradin Technologies Ltd. (Caesarea, Israel) which offers a solution similar to Microvision's, and bTendo Ltd. (Kfar Sava, Israel) which has a novel dual-mirror scanner using two MEMS chips.

National Semiconductor is also developing a pico projector based on lasers.  And TI promises to get into the scanning laser business too (eventually) and has already developed the technology for scanning printer applications.

Limiting quick growth of the scanning laser pico projectors is a shortage of the critical green laser. Only Corning (Corning, N.Y.) and Osram Opto Semiconductors GmbH (Regensburg, Germany) make them, which are predicted to be in short supply until 2011.

Copyright 2010 MEMS Investor Journal