Super resolution projection: leveraging the MEMS speed to double or quadruple the resolution

Texas Instruments’ digital mirror device (DMD) uses thousands to millions of individual micromirrors to direct light as a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). The Tilt-Roll-Pixel (TRP) is currently the smallest DLP Products pixel node at 5.4μm pitch. The small micromirror size, which enables fast switching speed, and precise tilt angles, exploits this speed on a system level to double or quadruple the resolution by using super-resolution projection. Super-resolution projection overlays multiple sub-sampled images, each shifted on the screen by a fraction of a pixel, and as long as the shifting occurs at a rate faster than the critical flicker fusion threshold, the human visual system will act as a temporal low pass filter and naturally integrate all low-resolution SLM images into a single super-resolution result. This paper will discuss the operation of the TRP node, how this node can be operated more quickly, how super-resolution projection works, and how we modified the optical architecture to leverage the switching speed for super-resolution projection.