A CMOS-Compatible Compact Display

The proliferation of portable electronic systems has created demand for high-resolution displays which are compact and highly energy-efficient. We have designed and built a proof-of-concept for a display that meets these design constraints. Our display uses a standard digital CMOS integrated circuit to produce a lowbrightness image, and an image intensifier to increase brightness to a visible level. Since a only very low light level needs to be generated from the CMOS chip the power efficiency is primarily determined by the intensifier which typically exhibit high efficiency. Moreover, exploiting high level of integration achieved by the CMOS IC, low power techniques such as pixel memory and data compression can be implemented further lowring the system power consumption. A display using our design should produce a daylight-visible image using approximately half a watt of power.