How To Display Video & Control Light Using TI DLP® Technology
DLP technology for display can be used to create amazing cinematic experiences as well as captivating projections from mobile devices. With products from WXGA all the way to vivid 4K UHD, DLP display chipsets deliver bright, crisp images.
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After more than two decades, DLP technology from Texas Instruments continues to bring impressive display solutions to the market and help innovators solve their light control challenges. Let's take a closer look at how this is made possible. At the heart of this unique and highly flexible technology is an optical semiconductor known as a digital micromirror device, or DMD. DMDs vary in resolution and size, and can contain over eight million mirrors.
Each mirror has a reflective aluminum surface that can be just a few microns wide. A DMD steers light by electrostatically deflecting or switching each mirror up to thousands of times per second. To make this possible, a 1 or 0 is loaded into a memory cell beneath each mirror, which activates electrodes that control whether the mirror is switched to an on or off state.
An image is created when a DMD is combined with a digital video signal, a light source, and projection optics. The technology can be used with virtually any light source, including lamps, LEDs, lasers, and laser phosphor. And the DMD can steer many types of light, including visible, infrared, and ultraviolet wavelengths.
As a light source illuminates the DMD, each mirror will either reflect light through the projection optics to display a white pixel or towards the light absorber to display a black pixel. Grayscale shades are determined by the length of time light is steered towards the projection path during each frame. In some systems, color is introduced by placing a color wheel between the light source and the DMD.
As the color wheel spins, it focuses red, green, and blue light on the mirror array. When the timing of each mirror is synchronized with the wheel, a shade of color is displayed. For example, a yellow pixel is displayed by turning a mirror toward the projection path when red and green light is landing on it. In other systems, colored LEDs or lasers can be used to display video without a color wheel.
Because the mirrors can switch so fast, a projection system based on DLP technology can display over one billion colors. And in industrial applications, the DMD's high speed pixel data rates are used for incredibly fast 3D scanning, printing, and sensing solutions. With its outstanding versatility and speed, TI's DLP technology continues to be trusted by innovators, retailers, and consumers in a wide range of display, industrial, and automotive solutions all around the world.
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