Digital Micro mirror Device (DMD)

For the past six years, Digital Light Processing technology from Texas Instruments has made significant inroads in the projection display market. With products enabling the world’s smallest data and video projectors, HDTV’s, and digital cinema, DLP technology is extremely powerful and flexible. With success of the DMD as a spatial light modulator for projector applications, dozens of new applications are now being enabled by general- use DMD products that are recently available to developers. The same light switching speed and “on-off” (contrast) ratio that have resulted in superior projector performance, along with the capability of operation outside the visible spectrum, make the DMD very attractive for many applications, including volumetric display, holographic data storage, lithography, scientific instrumentation, and medical imaging. Texas Instruments DLP display technology digitally manipulates (or processes) light to produce film-like, all-digital images. DLP integrates a projection lamp and an electronic video signal from a source such as a VCR or computer, and the processed light produces an all-digital picture. The key to this complete digital process is the Texas Instruments Digital Micro mirror Device (DMD), a thumbnail-size semiconductor light switch. The DMD consists of an array of thousands of micro-scopic size mirrors, each mounted on a hinge structure so that it can be individually tilted back and forth. When a lamp and a projection lens are positioned in the right places in the system, DLP processes the input video signal and tilts the mirrors to generate a digital image.