Texas Instruments Announces Enhanced Brightness, Color Saturation For DLPô Technology

ìSequential Color Recaptureî Technology Described At SID 2001 Conference

18-Jun-01

At the annual conference of the Society for Information Display (SID) - held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, California - Texas Instruments (TI) (NYSE: TXN) announced an exciting innovation which will allow projectors featuring DLPô technology to deliver images which can be up to 40 percent brighter than is currently possible or which feature greater color saturation - or a combination of increased brightness and increased color saturation. In a paper entitled ""Sequential Color Recapture And Dynamic Filtering: A Method Of Scrolling Color"" authored by D. Scott Dewald, Steven M. Penn, and Michael Davis of Texas Instruments, an innovative approach to increasing the efficiency of a single modulator display is described.""The current DLP single-panel technology has only one color present on the surface of the DMDô, meaning that, at any one time, one-third of the light is used while two-thirds of the light is wasted,"" said Scott Dewald of TI's DLP Products division, who delivered the paper at the conference. ""Sequential Color Recapture - SCR - is a technology that allows all three colors to be present simultaneously, such that a single panel DLP system can now be as efficient as - potentially more efficient than - a three-panel system, but without the additional parts, size, weight, and expense of three-panel systems.""""Although many solutions have been proposed to the challenge of maximizing the efficiency of single modulator displays,"" he continued, ""all have exhibited a high degree of mechanical complexity which would make manufacturability a real issue. One of the key virtues of SCR is its simplicity: it is no more complex than what we have today, requiring no additional moving parts.""The implementation of SCR technology requires a change to the color wheel and light integrating element currently employed in single-DMD DLP subsystems, together with changes in the DMD and the drive electronics. The optical capability of SCR has been made possible by advances in dichroic and metal thin-film technologies, the most important of these being the photolithographic patterning of dichroic coatings. The SCR color wheel is created from RGB dichroic coatings arranged in a ""spiral of Archimedes"" pattern.""This is a tremendously exciting development for DLP technology,"" said Dennis Fritsche, Manager for Business Products at TI's DLP Products Division. ""It has been a continuing goal to not only increase brightness, but also to increase color saturation - and SCR allows us to do both. On a panel-to-panel basis, DLP technology has always outperformed competing technologies. With this invention, we can now, in all respects, match three-panel modulators with a single DMD, but in the small, lightweight projectors that DLP technology uniquely enables because of its high speed and digitally consistent mirror technology. We are now investigating implementation plans and schedules to bring this revolutionary advancement to the marketplace.""For more information about DLP, visit www.dlp.com.

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