Portable Internet Appliance with Virtual SVGA Display

An SVGA resolution, liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplay was embedded into a highly portable, hand-held appliance for uses such as remote internet and information access. The resulting product was brand-named "eCase" to reflect the notion of an electronic briefcase. Due to its high resolution display, the eCase can store and retrieve documents in their original format for personal viewing. Unique magnifying optics allow near to eye viewing of the images with great clarity. Objective and Background Over the last three years, we have developed a robust liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplay with SVGA (600x800 pixel) resolution directed toward embedded, near to eye, virtual image applications. We found that adoption of our embedded microdisplays would be accelerated by our development of magnifying and illumination optical systems including the requisite control electronics, which otherwise our customers would have to independently develop (or even worse, independently tool for production). Our business activity is now largely based on delivery of complete display systems, with optics and ASIC's tooled for volume production. Our interest in embedded high-resolution displays was based on the observation that despite the large variety of available mobile computing platforms, all have required a compromise between pocket-size portability and display resolution. We wished to achieve a highly portable device form-factor, yet one which allows users to electronically access all of the types of documents of the typical desktop environment. To achieve this goal, we made the critical assumption that the targeted users would adapt to a near to eye display usage model if the display were to provide an image of the document equivalent to a full size laptop screen. This assumption was backed up by careful focus-group studies, which also confirmed that display image quality would be quite important to near to eye acceptance.