Texas Instruments Inc’s Digital Micromirror Device – 400,000 tiny aluminium mirrors, each mounted on a static RAM and rotated by electrostatics to turn them on and off, are to be exploited in the consumer market by Hayward, California-based Runco International Inc, which describes itself as an industry leader in high quality home theatre video products – that seems to mean that it makes projection television sets. The comany has an alliance with Texas Instruments Inc and plans to bring the Digital Light Processing system, which uses the micromirrors, to the consumer projection display market. The projection technology is said to offer size, weight, and portability advantages over liquid crystal diodes, and more importantly to deliver a better picture, and offer longer illumination life and semiconductor reliability. Runco says its current prototype delivers a very bright image with clarity, high contrast and well-balanced colour. The colour system combines the Digital Micromirror Device with signal processing, memory, software, optical components and an illumination source.
