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Can Pico projection capture a niche market?
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Thursday, October 28, 2010
A salesman needs to display a PowerPoint, but doesn't want to wait for his laptop to boot up. Instead, he pushes a button on his mobile phone and the slides appear on the wall.
A teenager, at lunch with friends, wants to show them video from the party last night. She whips out her cell phone and projects the video onto the table.
Market researchers are predicting that tiny projection modules - called pico projectors - will start appearing in consumer electronics devices over the next three years. But whether they will become a niche feature on a few high-end smart phones or as ubiquitous as cameras in today's mobile phones is the big question.
From a base of near zero today (a handful of phones and digital cameras entered the market this year, mostly in Asia), In-Stat forecasts that consumer electronics with embedded projectors will grow to shipments of 20 million units by 2014. Most of those - some 18 million - are expected to be mobile handsets.
Several pico-projection technologies are competing for OEM designs. Pico projectors combine a modulator, a light source, optics, and electronics, but different vendors use different modulation technologies and, in some cases, different light sources. For modulation, the main technologies are digital light processing (DLP), liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS), and scanning micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS). For light sources, there are LEDs and laser diodes.
Today, most pico projectors are stand-alone units. But embedded applications will rise rapidly and overtake stand-alone units in terms of shipments by 2018, according to DisplaySearch. For that year, the market researcher forecasts total pico-projector revenue of $13.9 billion, with shipments of 45 million stand-alone projectors and 94 million embedded projectors.
The key to winning the embedded market will be finding the right balance among brightness, power consumption and display quality at a reasonable bill-of-materials (BOM) cost. Solid, consistent information BOM cost is hard to find because the market is in such an early stage, said Paul Semenza, a senior vice president at DisplaySearch. Regardless, most everyone agrees that as of today it's still too high for any embedded market to take off.
Frank Dickson, vice president of research for mobile Internet at In-Stat, estimated a BOM cost of about $80 for embedded pico projectors, which he said would add about $150 to the retail cost of a cell phone. He thinks that could drop to less than $25 (adding less than $50 to the retail cost) by 2014.
But those figures are averages across all the pico-projector technologies, which vary widely in their specific costs. In terms of individual technologies, LCOS is the lowest cost and scanning MEMS the highest, while DLP falls somewhere in between, according to Semenza. LCOS may hold the biggest promise for lower costs in the future. The technology itself is simple and cheap, explained Semenza, as companies can use trailing edge semiconductor technology at foundries. The key to lowering costs would simply be increasing volumes.
In fact, Syndiant Inc, a fabless semiconductor company that has designed an LCOS-based modulator, claims costs are already low. Mark Harward, co-founder, president, and CEO of the company, said the BOM cost of the optic engine - incorporating the modulator, light source and optics - is $30 today and will reach $20 or less by 2013.
On the other end of the scale, scanning MEMS is expensive primarily because of the cost of the green laser it uses, said Alexander Tokman, CEO of Microvision Inc, one of the leading companies using that technology. "The first-generation, synthetic green lasers that we are using today are not particularly cost effective" for high-volume embedded applications like cell phones, he said. But he expects costs to drop significantly in the second half of 2011, when second-generation, direct green lasers are expected to be commercially available. Not only will these lasers cost only 10 to 20% of today's green lasers, they will be smaller, lower power, and available from five different suppliers in a standard package, said Tokman. (Today, there are only two suppliers.)
While he won't give a current BOM cost, Tokman said he believes that his company can reduce BOM costs to below $100 for Microvision's display engine for low volumes of cell phones, and hopes to drive that down to $50 in high volumes. That all depends on the schedule of the laser suppliers, however. "High volume is directly linked to the availability of the second-generation direct green lasers, which are targeted to the second half of 2011," he said.
Tokman thinks telecom carriers might heavily subsidize the cost of these handsets because the pico projector will prompt consumers to download more data. Consumers could project not only photos, but video like a sports event or electronic game, and share it with friends. "I believe it's going to completely revolutionize how people view and share information," said Tokman.
That's the hope of Frank Moizio, too. The manager of the DLP pico projection business at Texas Instruments thinks projectors just might become as ubiquitous as cameras in mobile phones. Until recently, cell phones have been "individual use" devices, but Moizio thinks that's changing. With the proliferation of photos and video, phones are moving to a "shared experience paradigm," he said, and projection is an ideal way to do that. "Projection gets [us] the biggest image from the smallest box," he said.
By: DocMemory
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