Photo courtesy Silicon Light Machines Diagram of a single grating light valve pixel on a GLV chip

The GLV chip consists of tiny reflective ribbons mounted over a silicon chip. The ribbons are suspended over the chip with a small airgap in between. When a voltage is applied to the chip below a ribbon, the ribbon moves toward the chip by a fraction of the wavelength of the illuminating light. The deformed ribbons form a diffraction grating, and the various orders of light can be combined to form the pixel of an image. The shape of the ribbons, and therefore the image information, can be changed in as little as 20 billionths of a second.

To make a projector, the GLV pixels are arranged in a vertical line that is 1,080 pixels long. Light from three lasers, one red, one green and one blue, shines on the GLV and is rapidly scanned across the display screen at 60 frames per second to form the image.

 

Photo courtesy Silicon Light Machines Diagram showing the scanned architecture of GLV technology: As the scan moves horizontally, the GLV pixels change to represent columns of video data, thereby forming one two-dimensional image per scan. The scanning rate is 60 frames per second.

 

Photo courtesy Silicon Light Machines Example of a projected image using GLV technology

A major advantage of GLV technology is that GLV chips can make high-resolution images at a relatively low cost. For example, because a 1,920x1,080 pixel image can be achieved by scanning a 1,080-pixel linear array, a GLV chip can be manufactured to achieve this resolution with only 1,080 pixels, instead of the 2 million needed for other technology, such as DMD. Also, because the ribbons are aligned vertically, there are no horizontal gaps in the image -- there is a very high fill space on the chip.