MICROVISION NEW DESIGN WILL CUT MICRO SCANNER SIZE BY 60%.

Microvision, Inc. (Nasdaq:MVIS) announced recently that it has begun fabricating a new micro mechanical (MEMS) optical scanner that is a full 60% smaller than the devices that it is currently producing for a range of electronic display and imaging products.

The company's silicon micro scanner chips vibrate a single tiny (approximately one square millimeter) mirror suspended inside a small frame, at a very high frequency. By bouncing a beam of colored light off of the mirror, the chip can be used as a miniature projection display, delivering full motion, high-resolution video in products ranging from wearable displays to handheld mobile internet devices. By coupling this beam projector with a light sensitive electronic chip, the same micro scanning system can be used as a kind of miniature electronic camera for applications like bar-code reading, endoscopy or high magnification machine vision systems.

The company is currently marketing a wearable display product called the Nomad Personal Display based on a scanner chip that is 7 millimeters by 13 millimeters. With its new design the company has reduced the size of the chip to only 6 millimeters by 6 millimeters. As a result, the area of the chip is reduced from 91mm to only 36mm allowing more than 3 times the number of scanners to be produced on a 4-inch silicon wafer.

The new design is the result of an Office of Naval Research program entitled Battlespace Information Display Technology (BIDT) that was subcontracted to Microvision by Concurrent Technologies Corporation. The objective of the program is to develop technologies to enable very lightweight and low power wearable displays capable of improved resolution for a variety of potential combat applications, and to deliver solutions that can be leveraged into commercial markets as well.

According to Dr. V.G Veeraraghavan, Sr. Vice President for Research and Product Development at Microvision, reducing the scanner's physical dimensions will not only have an impact on reducing the size of the display engine, for both military and commercial products, but is also a key driver for reducing cost.

"With this new design we will be able to fit 156 scanner die on the same wafer that today holds only 50," said Veeraraghavan. "Since the cost of the wafer and the wafer processing are roughly the same, that means that each new scanner will cost roughly 1/3 of the cost of the current scanners, if the yields are comparable."

According to the company, reducing silicon area is one of the keys to achieving cost reductions for any microchip. Microvision says its micro scanning display is already much smaller compared to miniature flat panel displays of comparable resolution, and that the new design will further extend that advantage.

In addition to being much smaller, Microvision's chip -- with its single mirror -- is a much simpler chip compared to miniature flat panel displays, which must have half a million or more tiny features to provide high resolution. As a result of this simplicity, the company says that it can produce wafers with very few defective devices. Such "high yields" are another key component in reducing the cost of microchips.

"We can produce a lot more displays per wafer because of the smaller area," said Rick Rutkowski, Microvision CEO. "And we can compound that advantage with improved yields to enable a mix of cost and performance that is disruptive in the industry."

According to Rutkowski, many emerging markets for miniature displays require a mix of high performance and low cost that has been difficult to achieve with miniature flat panel technologies.

"Most of the miniature displays in the market today are very low-resolution displays, typically producing only 60,000 color pixels," Rutkowski added. "That's a small fraction of the resolution that we're accustomed to on computer monitors. Because of that, use has been limited to things like viewfinders for camcorders and cameras. We believe that going forward the big demand will be for displays of much higher resolution, because they will enable the ability to view the same program files and media content that we look at on desktop monitors. But the real key is to provide dramatically increased resolution without increasing the cost of a miniature display. We believe we can drive down the cost curve very aggressively because of fundamental advantages in both silicon area and yield. This latest milestone is encouraging evidence that this strategy is working."

The company indicated that it is producing scanners with the new design to support compatibility with its current method of driving the scanner as well as with a new ultra-low power drive method demonstrated recently. The company expects to continue work on the new scanner design under the BIDT program this year, but has not yet announced when it will begin to produce the new design commercially.