Video Projector on a Chip?

Stile 65 writes "Cornell researchers have made a 0.2mm-squared mirror mounted on carbon fibers that can oscillate at 2.5KHz, 'caus[ing] a laser beam to scan across a range of up to 180 degrees.' These can be mounted on a chip, and in combination with lasers, arrays of such mirrors on a chip can be made into a video projector. From the article: ''"It would be an incredibly cheap display," [Cornell grad student Shahyaan] Desai said. And the entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall."' This display is made possible because of the innovative use of carbon fiber instead of silicon in MEMS. Unlike a standard DMD, this type of device would have one mirror per scanline, not one mirror per pixel, allowing the chip to be much smaller."

Wow!

[popeguilty (961923)]

Finally, the resolution of a cellphone VDU on a screen the size of a bedsheet! Amazing!

Prediction:

[The MAZZTer (911996)]

Virus that causes porn movies to randomly play through this display on cell phones. Man that would be embarrassing in a public place like a mall or something. Which is exactly why someone is going to make it.

Re:Prediction:

[LindseyJ (983603)]

Virus... Or feature?

manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre?

[peter303 (12292)]

The largest silicon chips approach a billion devices at a cost of $0.0001 cent per device. What is the manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre?

Re:

[kfg (145172)]

The largest silicon chips approach a billion devices at a cost of $0.0001 cent per device.

And that's why LCD displays cost about a buck.

What is the manufacturing efficiency of carbon fibre?

The carbon fiber in a thirty dollar fishing pole is measured in kilometers. In this device the carbon fiber elements are measured in microns. Only one device per scanline is needed.

As per my first sentence generally manufacturing costs swamp materials costs when building per unit, but as per my fourth sentence a 1024x768

At least CRTs had phosphor "memory"

[Jeff DeMaagd (2015)]

What does this have? Phosphors hold their brightness a little bit, down a reducing curve. This sort of display would have the scan line refresh issue of CRTs without the benefit of the fade curve, the light disappears immediately, so then it's just retina response time. I would expect that this would have to have a pretty high refresh rate to not be annoying. Will this allow three-chip operation? Consumer DLPs have a "rainbow effect" because only one chip flashes out the red, green and blue parts of the image. This doesn't bother everyone but I suspect that this system will have similar laments.

2.5 KHz is a pretty high refresh rate

[by Anonymous Coward]

Since it uses one fibre per scane line the oscillation rate is the same as the refresh rate.

Re:At least CRTs had phosphor "memory"

[Veldcath (591080)]

If you read the article, they are talking about having one mirror per scan-line... and talking about oscillating the mirrors at a rate of 2.5 kHz. So it would be drawing 2,500 times a second. And they're also saying it would be one mirror per line, so you'd be seeing the entire display refresh 2,500 times a second. Considering that movies are projected at twenty four frames per second and our persistance of vision handles that with relative ease, I suspect a scan rate of 2.5 kHz would be more than adequate to create a very solid-looking image.

-V

Re:

[fishybell (516991)]

Have you ever taken a picture of a CRT with a camera? Unless you drop the shutter speed real low you only get an inch of the displayed picture. The parts directly before the inch of graphics are not faded, but rather completely black. The visual dropoff for the pixel is extremely quick, and the dropoff for your retinas is by far slower. A laser based device would have to be about 75hz not to cause noticable flickering, just a CRT.

No^2

[imsabbel (611519)]

No, its not such a new and great idea. Schneider was building a project "laser tv" 15 years ago.

and

No, they are missing one thing: Brighness still does need power. While lasers have become more efficient, and the lifetime of blue ones doesnt suck anymore (thanks to lots of $$ invested by storage companies), there is still physics to play with:

with a perfect display screen, you need at least 15W (rough estimate, dont care to converte the lumens right now) of photon power per m^2 to get a usable picture.
That of course would mean you would need those 15W in Laser emitters. As tubes are prohibitively expensive, that means diods. Diods are a _bit_ heat sensitive (they die like flies if anything is not to their liking), and i havent seen 5W or higher diods without a good cooling solution (because they will still protuce 2 times as much heat as light, and that in a very small volume.

Not to mention the little fact that a single 1W blue laser diode right now would be more expensive than a HD-Dlp beamer (plus it would degrade quickly to unusability).

and society marches backward...

[User 956 (568564)]

"It would be an incredibly cheap display," [Cornell grad student Shahyaan] Desai said. And the entire device would be small enough to build into a cell phone to project an image on a wall." This is just what we need. There's already people on the subway that use the speaker on their phone to subject everyone to their poor taste in music. Now we'll have people subjecting everyone to their poor taste in television as well.

Incoming call...

[Durrok (912509)]

*phone rings*
*display activates*
Princess Leia: Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you're my only hope!

oblig. Star Wars Comment

[kemo_by_the_kilo (971543)]

so, in 5 years will princess leia send me a video message?

It will be like this:

[geekoid (135745)]

"Help me Kemo_by_the_kilo, you're my only hope......I am the princess of an aquabarian abbassador who was killed in..."

or

"Help me Kemo_by_the_kilo, you're my only hope is what your woman will say with your new prehensile penis!"

Sweet, now I can

[geekoid (135745)]

give a power point presentation to the other people on the bus!

Devil's in the details...

[posterlogo (943853)]

You still need a light source -- in this case, lasers. Yes, I know you can get red lasers dirt cheap, but any thing else is very expensive. A laser light source operates at a defined wavelength, and although you cannot easily generate the full spectrum of colors from a single laser. You can get a red, green, and blue laser to potentially mix to generate the full visible spectrum, but the green and especially the blue lasers are very expensive. Also, size does matter -- it is difficult to pack bright light power sources into a small space, like say a cell phone. The techology leap forward here is great in principle, but the phrase "Video projector on a chip" is incorrect, since only the mirrors are on the chip, not the light source.

Cheaper TVs?

[dosius (230542)]

I'd like to see if a regular, broadcast TV could be designed to use one of these and project on my wall, and how well it would rival current home theater setup.

-uso.

Doesn't sound too good to me...

[GreyPoopon (411036)]

From the article...

"You need something incredibly stiff to oscillate at a resonant frequency of 60,000 times a second (the line-scanning rate of most video displays)..."

Desai first showed that micrometer-scale carbon fibers can bend like tiny fishing rods by more than 90 degrees and can be made to vibrate billions of times without breaking down.

So, even at 500 billion times, that would be a lifetime of only 2314 hours?? No thanks. Please post again when they get it up to 10,000.

"Carbon is normally a brittle material," Desai said, "but in the fiber form it resists breakage. We have some data implying that if it lasts three and a half days it's going to last forever."

There's science for you...

Hello Virtual Boy

[KalvinB (205500)]

The Virtual Boy had a single column of LEDs and a vibrating mirror for each eye.

It looks like they've replaced LEDs with lasers and more of them.

I'm still waiting for cheap small (2" max in width/height) high resolution (640x480 min) LCD displays so we can finally hook up head mounted 3D displays to our next gen game consoles that have dual video out so you can hook one console up to two TVs for dual player action/wide screen action or to one pair of 3D glasses so we can view our 3D games in 3D.

Re:A Step Up (down in size) from this

[DanMc (623041)]

Agreed! Although Light Blue Optics Ltd's devices aren't available on the market yet, and they claim to have no mirrors, prisms, or moving parts. I poked around in Feb when LBO announced their laser projector tech. I couldn't believe no one had tried to make a cheap laser/mirror scanning projector. I found some patents on the technology from the 70's that appear to be used by companies doing the "Pink Floyd laser light show" type devices. They just don't understand what they have could be used to kill off the multi-million dollar LCD projector market, home theater, and even win the LCD/Plasma/OLED/etc TV wars.

Re:A Step Up (down in size) from this

[aethera (248722)]

You mean Laser Video. [wikipedia.org] It's here, its just not there yet. I worked for a while for one of those "Pink Floyd" laser light show companies, actually one of the biggest in the world, and we were all trying to make laser video a reality five years ago, even a decade ago. Laser video would have higher brightness and no distortion, even if projected onto angled or curved surfaces, and incredible colors if:
 

we could get the scan rate higher. The optics just hum drawing those lines (laser video isn't vector scanned like most entertainment laser applications). The beam from a laser big enough to do outdoor video might be 1/16th of an inch or bigger before it even leaves the projector head. So even a mirror just 1/8th wide is needed to scan the beam. And that mirror has to move stop and redraw thousands of times a second. One mirror rotating for horizontal refresh, one galvonmeter for vertical drawing (this is the part that gets really sticky on a big screen) and an AOM for the color changes (a custom grown crystal that will vibrate at different frequencies when in the presence of an RF signal, thus blanking the beam (turning it off and on) and diffracting it (picking the color).

Also, if we could get the color right. Solid state lasers are helping here quite a bit, though the blue lines could still use more brightness. But until the big solid state lasers come down in price, a lot of the pros (and I don't mean the guy who did the lasers at your rave) are still dependent on their ancient SpectraPhyscics 171. Three phase power, a fire hydrant's worth of water, a drain, two men to carry the exciter, two to carry the head, two to carry the projector, and thats just one laser. Our small shows had three (one for full color graphics, two for beams in the air). Mosat guys are now using sold state yags for their beam effects. The solid state full colors are pricey. I believe the laser show at Hershey Park is using a full color solid state laser, I don't know who else, its been a few years.
   

That being said, laser video is starting to show up in more and more places, and it is looking really good. Just don't expect to be putting one in your living room any time soon. Aside from the cost, lasers are heavily regulated in the US. One bright enough to replace your tv is going to require a whole host of permits from the CDRH (Center for Devices and Radiological Health) and your state, plus don't even think about doing your own laser display outside, the FAA's paperwork will make your head spin.
    PS, apologies to all the laser jocks if I got something horribly wrong, its been a few years for me, its late, I have a screaming infant and I'm doing this all off the top of my head.

Re:What about power?

[syousef (465911)]

what kind of cell phone is going to have the power to do video projection

One powered by a Dell laptop battery.

Re:

[budgenator (254554)]

About the same as a common laser pointer 5mW is a lot of laser light at least in red, not sure how much more you'd need for a decent green or blue laser so let's guestimate 25mW total for indoor usage, a 1/2 W would probably handle outdoors in almost direct daylight I'd guess. These figures are very reason considering what a plasma display or a LCD projector would consume.

Re:

[NormalVisual (565491)]

Green would actually need to be a lot less power, since your eyes are much more sensitive to green than anything else. A 5mW green YAG looks a hell of a lot brighter than a 5mW red diode, for instance. Similarly, you're less sensitive to blue, so the blue component would have to be ramped up to compensate. I've yet to see any low-cost solid-state blue units yet, though.

Re:

[Overzeetop (214511)]

Well, they're talking about two things, they probably mean that the modulus of elsticity (the "stiffness", based on Young's Modulus, expressed in psi or pascals) is double that of silicon, but the yield point, or flexibility (how far it can bend before it permanently deforms) is 10 times that of silicon. It's a dumbing down of the mechanical properties using common language and, no, it really doesn't make sense the way they've presented it if you try and apply logic to the langugae they've used.