Microvision Demos Microdisplay

BOTHELL, Wash., Aug. 18 -- Microvision Inc., a Bothell, Wash., light-scanning technology company, announced it has developed a scalable architecture for its microdisplays in which a single scanner is used to direct multiple beams simultaneously into separate zones of an image. The company said the new architecture has the potential to deliver a bright, high-resolution, image over a very wide field of view, creating an immersive "big-screen" effect with potential applications such as personal theater and gaming.

The engineering prototype uses a few tens of LEDs to write approximately 7.6 million red, green and blue spots that integrate to form a single high-fidelity image; Microvision used an existing scanner and drive electronics to deliver all 7.6 million pixels into a 1.4 million-pixel frame. The array architecture can alternatively be configured to provide increased spatial resolution. The resulting color fields are overlapped in a series of zones using a third-generation microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) scanner. The display delivers an image with a full 30-degree horizontal field of view and has the potential to be significantly brighter than earlier microdisplay prototypes with narrower field of views, at a lower cost, Microvision said.

"This is a major milestone in the development of color microdisplays for consumer products," said Steve Willey, president of Microvision. "With our earlier single-channel architecture, we are approaching a practical limit in field of view of around 25 degrees. Now we have the flexibility of increasing display performance by adding inexpensive LEDs and writing multiple zones.

"The architecture evolved from our earlier work with multiline image writing that used conventional laser sources. It's very scalable and allows us to take advantage of the benefits of declining costs of memory, processing power and most significantly, inexpensive and increasingly bright LEDs," Willey said.

For more information, visit: www.microvision.com