'Pico Projectors' Creating Buzz at CES

Texas Instruments (TI) DLP chips are taking center stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas today, as electronics companies ranging from Samsung to Dell to Toshiba demonstrate so-called "pico projector" technology.

The new technology, which enables cell-phone-sized handheld devices to project videos and computer files on screens as big as 50 inches, uses a TI chipset that got its start in the television market. Known as the DLP Pico Chipset, the new technology is serving as the foundation for such tiny projectors as the Samsung MBP200, the Cinemin Stick from WowWee Technologies, Pico PK-101 from Optoma, the BUG projector from BUG Labs and a host of pico-based notebook companion products from Dell, Toshiba and Acer. Most notably, Samsung today is reportedly wowing CES showgoers by demonstrating a soon-to-be-released "smart phone" from Samsung that incorporates DLP Pico technology, thus enabling it to project multimedia.

"We saw it last night and it's an incredible product," says Frank Moizio, business manager for DLP emerging markets at TI. "It's absolutely amazing."

TI engineers say the key to the splashy debut of such products is its DLP technology, which consists of microchips that incorporate millions of tiny mirrors measuring just 8 µm across. The core feature of the technology is the switching speed of the mirrors - at 8 µs, they're about 1,000 times faster than liquid crystal displays, TI says. To date, the technology has made a name for itself in HDTV systems.

TI engineers say they glimpsed an opportunity a few years ago in the projection market. "We saw that mobile devices had a limited viewing screen and we asked, ‘Is there a way we can apply our technology to solve that problem?'" Moizio said at CES earlier today. "We were talking about, ‘Wipe the slate clean and figure out how to go from a two-pound product to a two-ounce product.'"

TI spent two years developing the DLP chipset before introducing it as a concept at CES last year. This year, many of the products have gone into, or are about to go into, full production.

Competing concepts are expected to be introduced at this year's CES. DLP Pico's low power consumption and small size, however, appear to have given TI a head start in the Pico Projector arena.

"From here, our technology looks like it's only going to get better with time," Moizio said.  

View a video of Pico DLP at CES.