Short for Liquid Crystal on Silicon, it is micro-display technology related to LCD, where liquid crystal material has a twisted-nematic structure but is sealed directly to the surface of a silicon chip. * The electronic drivers controlling the crystals’ alignment are etched into the silicon. Using these, several million pixels can fit in an area as small as one square inch. The chip is coated with an aluminized layer, which means that LCoS is highly reflective allowing more light to pass on. [Adapted from Digital Home magazine]
There are two classes of LCOS.
- In a single-chip system, light is filtered through a color-wheel system where the sequence of colors produced is coordinated with the modulation of light by the liquid crystals, producing subtle color variations.
- In a three-chip system LCoS uses a system of prisms to split a single light source into its red, green and blue components. Video modulations are applied individually to the three resulting light paths, which are then recombined by another prism array to create the composite image.
