The inventor of the DLP digital imaging chip from Texas Instruments will discuss the origins and workings of the technology in a special lecture marking National Engineers Week.
Dr. Larry Hornbeck will speak Wednesday, Feb. 17, at 5 p.m. in TI Auditorium (ECSS 2.102) in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT Dallas.
Titled “DLP Technology: Extreme Versatility,” the talk will be followed by an open discussion about how a concept can survive development and then blossom into unexpected applications.
The heart of the DLP chip is the Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), an optical semiconductor that includes as many as 2 million hinged, tiltable, individually controllable micromirrors. The DMD’s tiny mirrors tilt thousands of times a second to create an image by directing pulses of light through a projection lens and onto a television, presentation or movie theater screen.
DLP technology is used in a variety of display products ranging from pico-projectors embedded in cell phones to a wide selection of DLP front-projectors and rear-projection HDTVs to TI’s DLP Cinema projectors that light up nearly 11,000 screens globally. Hornbeck holds a series of seminal patents that form the foundation for DMD technology, and he has received numerous awards and honors, including an Emmy Engineering Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences.
In May 2009 he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is a TI fellow, an IEEE fellow, a fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Additional details are available at the Web site for the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.