TI Outlines Strategy For DLPô Home Entertainment Business

Identifies Progress Since CES 2000, Describes Future Plans

24-Jan-01

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Texas Instruments (TI) outlined the strategy for its DLPô Home Entertainment business. Commenting on the broad range of home entertainment systems at the TI booth, Dale Zimmerman, Business Manager for DLP Home Entertainment Systems, said: ""We've come a very long way since CES last year. Increasingly, manufacturers of home entertainment systems are turning to DLP technology to help them deliver what their customers want - outstanding image quality in sleek, elegant packages. They find that they can't get the image quality they need with LCD technology, and CRT restricts them to large, cumbersome designs to which consumers are somewhat resistant. With DLP, they get the best of both worlds."" The most recent company to identify the strategic importance of Digital Light Processingô technology to developing its home entertainment offering was Yamaha Corporation. Yamaha joined a growing list of manufacturers including Davis, DreamVision, DWIN, Marantz, PLUS, SIM2 Multimedia (Seleco), Runco and Zenith who feature DLP technology in their front projection solutions, with household names Hitachi, Mitsubishi and Panasonic featuring DLP technology in their top-of-the-line HD rear-projection systems. ""It may have seemed in the past that we were somewhat reticent about DLP in the home entertainment market,"" continued Zimmerman, ""and to some extent, we probably were. That reticence was based on our desire to ensure that, when consumers - as opposed to business users - were exposed to DLP for the first time, they'd see a video image which was clearly the best they'd ever seen. We've been developing the technology to the point where, now, we feel it meets the high standards we set ourselves."" Zimmerman went on to talk about how TI's DLPô Home Entertainment business would develop in the future. He noted that the company has a limited number of customer engagements to bring to market front projection systems using 16:9 aspect ratio of the DMD similar to that used in rear projection systems and in TI's DLP Cinemaô projectors - something which, he said, the home entertainment marketplace had been demanding. First products to feature this version of DLP technology are expected during the middle of the year. Beyond this, he indicated that he expected the number of rear projection manufacturers with whom TI would work to develop future generations of large screen home entertainment systems was likely to grow. ""Strategically,"" he said, ""the home entertainment marketplace is extremely important to us in developing the DLP business."" ""We believe there's a place for both front projection and rear projection,"" Zimmerman concluded, ""and that DLP is the optimum technology for both. Front projection will give the consumer the largest image he can get in his home, and the flexibility to project images anywhere he wants. Rear projection will give him outstanding image quality even in high ambient light, and an elegant focal point for the family's home entertainment experience. Today, TI supplies DLP subsystems to more than thirty of the world's top projector manufacturers, who then design, manufacture and market projectors based on DLP technology. There are now over fifty products based on DLP technology in the market. Since early 1996, over 500,000 DLP subsystems have been shipped. Over the past four years, DLP technology-based projectors have consistently won some of the audio-visual industry's most prestigious awards, including, in June 1998, an EmmyÆ Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. At the heart of TI's Digital Light Processing technology is the Digital Micromirror Deviceô optical semiconductor chip. The DMDô switch has an array of up to 1,310,000 hinged, microscopic mirrors which operate as optical switches to create a high resolution, full color image. More information on TI's DLP technology can be found on the Web at www.dlp.com.

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