Electronics development of color sequential silicon microdisplay for virtual reality applications

We have developed a highly integrated liquid-crystal-on-silicon microdisplay for virtual reality applications. The silicon panel was designed and fabricated by a custom 0.5 mu m 3-metal CMOS technology with 704 x 576 pixels. We further utilized field programmable gate array (FPGA) as an application specific integrated circuit to implement a color sequential technique. Image scaling was also applied to linearly expand VGA, NTSC and PAL images in order to fill the whole display panel. As a result, we were able to display VGA, NTSC and PAL videos by the same display system. This compact microdisplay system can lead to a variety of virtual reality applications.