An Alternative Architecture for High-Performance Display

This paper presents an innovative system architecture that leverages the fast switching speed, nonlinear output response, and high optical flux threshold of the Grating Light Valve (GLV)* technology to create high-performance displays. This architecture creates a high-resolution projected image by optically scanning a linear array of GLV pixels, requiring about two thousand times fewer pixels than a 2-D panel and about one thousand times lower bandwidth than a scanned-spot approach for HDTV display. A 1080p projection display prototype based on this architecture has been developed, which displays 1920 × 1080 resolution, 30-bit color (10 bit/channel RGB) and up to 120-Hz refresh. The system receives 1080p video data at 24 or 30 frames/sec via a standard SMPTE 292M serial digital interface. While leveraging many traditional realtime video-processing techniques, several processing steps that are unique to the scanned linear architecture have been developed, including display mapping, data calibration, row/column transpose, frame rate multiply, and frame dither/refresh. The system is synchronous at 74.25 MHz.