Texas Instruments

Here's a nice video from CES 2012 with a TI representative showing their DLP pico projector chips:

Wavien (a US based technology licensing company) developed a new pico projector solution based on TI's DLP technology. Wavien's Recycling LED Technology (RLT) technology dramatically reduces the number of components required in the illumination section of the projector (from 17 to only 6) and so lowers the cost and increases the reliability of the system.

Basically Wavien has combined the three color LEDs (red, green and blue) packages into a single package. This allowed them to reduce the component count from 17 to 6 (and the company says that they potentially they'll be able to reduce it even further to only 3 components). They are using TI's 0.45” WXGA DLP chip - whic is used for micro projectors and not pico ones, but perhaps it can adapted to smaller DLPs, too.

Someone from TI gives a short presentation about DLP pico-projectors - with the main point being that interactive pico-projectors will be a 'significant' evolution:

TI is showing a new USB pico-projector prototype at MWC. Like all USB pico-projectors it doesn't include a battery, and gets both input and power from the USB port. The projector is obviously a DLP offering 20 lumens and it probably uses TI's new generation of DLP chips that were announced yesterday.

We've seen several USB pico-projectors over the past few years, all of them use LCoS engines (just last month Himax unveiled a USB 3.0 design). It's good to see TI entering this field and I guess they will soon offer a reference design for companies to actually offer such products. 

TI announced new VGA and WVGA DLP-Pico chipsets that have enhanced brightness without increasing power usage over previous designs. The new chips are also smaller and cheaper than before. This is TI's third generation of DLP-Pico chips. We do not have a photo yet... but here are the two previous generations (you can see how then 2nd gen chips are smaller):

DLP chips, Gen1 and Gen2

TI is targeting digital cameras and camcorders for the VGA chip and mobile phones for the WVGA ones.

Texas Instruments announced the latest addition to the DLP-Pico chipset family - a HD chipset supporting WXGA resolutions. The new chip is also the brightest and most efficient DLP-Pico ever, according to TI. Here's TI rather bizarre photo of the new chip:

TI says that several companies are already working on projectors that will have this chip - and it seems that these will not be pico-projectors really, as they are larger than you'd expect... It's also not clear what the real resolution of this chipset is (because WXGA is not specific), but it is most likely 1280x720.

Digitimes has posted an interesting update about pico-projectors.First of all, they report that the upcoming Nikon camera-projector will be using Himax Technologies' LCoS module. It will hit the market in August. Another digital camera with a DLP projector is being co-developed by Asia Optical and TI. It will start shipping in September.

Asia Optical plans to ship 200,000-250,000 modules for Microvisions' Show-WX projector in 2010, and 100,000 modules for other vendors. In 2011 they expect to ship 8 million DLP modules for handsets. In 2012 it will grow to 12 million.

Digitimes also gives an update on pricing: a 11cc DLP light engine was priced at about $65-100 in 2009, and this will drop to $50-85 in 2010, with the size shrinking to 8cc. A 10cc LCoS costs $65 (in 2009, anyway), and this will be reduced to $30-50 in 2010, with the size dropping to only 4.5cc.