Mobile phones are incorporating pico projectors for
on-the-spot presentations, or for just sharing photos with friends, projected
up to 100 inches wide, according to Texas Instruments, which has downsized its
digital light processors (DLPs) from the big-screen cinema for pico projectors
shown in four mobile phones from Samsung, LG and NTT
DoCoMo at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Feb. 15-18, 2010.
Pico projectors shrink down the mechanisms of a full-size
projector to the size of a microchip. TI's DLP,
for instance, uses thousands of tiny mirrors fabricated on a
micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chip.
"Our DLP chipsets
enable a pico projector to fit inside virtually any mobile phone," says TI's
Frank Moizio, manager
of the company’s DLP Emerging Markets
business. "DLP-based pico projector
modules can use any solid-state light source—today red, blue and green LEDs,
but even brighter images in the future will use semiconductor lasers."
Besides TI, other MEMS-based pico projector chips are
currently being designed into mobile phone modules by Asia Optical (using a
chip from Microvision) and National Semiconductor, along with a non-MEMS
offering from 3M using liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCOS) technology. Currently,
about a dozen new mobile phones with pico projectors are slated to be announced
later in 2010. In-Stat forecasts that revenue from pico projectors will exceed
$1 billion by 2014.
At the Mobile World Congress, Samsung showed two mobile
phones using TI's DLP-based pico projector
module with LEDs as their source of illumination. The W9600 is currently only
available in Asia, but a worldwide model running the
Android operating system, the Beam, was even slimmer—about the size of an
iPhone.
Photos courtesy of Samsung
The most novel model at MWC was made by Fujitsu for Japanese
mobile phone carrier NTT DoCoMo. Using the
modular approach, the NTT DoCoMo “Dock
F-04B" divides in half like a deck of cards, allowing you to sit the
bottom half with the projector down on a flat surface, then use the top half—which
is also your phone—as a remote control.
LG's Expo model shown at MWC also used the modular approach
to add on a DLP-based pico projector to its
mobile phone. To add the pico projector module to the LG Expo, users merely
unsnap the battery compartment cover and snap on the pico projector module,
then use the Expo's touch screen to control the projector.
Photo courtesy of LG
For the next generation of pico projectors built into even
the smallest, slimmest clamshell and flip phones, TI showed a new DLP
pico projector chip with 640 by 360 pixels—near DVD
quality, but in a package that is 50 percent smaller and 20 percent thinner
than the 854-by-480-pixel pico projectors of today. The smaller pico projector
chip will also be priced lower than its big brother, hastening the day when
pico projectors are as common as cell phone cameras are today.
