TECHNOLOGY FOR CHANGE

Pico Projectors Marry Mobile Phones

R. Colin Johnson | Date: 02-19-10 | Comments

Mobile phones are incorporating pico projectors for on-the-spot presentations, or for just sharing photos with friends, projected up to 100 inches wide. Four phones showcased that feature at Mobile World Congress.

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.