Digital Light Processing

They were at university getting their PhDs, and they went out and started working at companies.

My, my colleague went through that, got his PhD, worked at a large company called Texas Instruments, and he worked on the first US government-funded MEMS, uh, program called the Digital Light Processing chip, which he developed with Larry Hornbeck, uh, the inventor, and he built those first devices.

He was brought up, uh, in a corporate environment where you actually had to build a product.

Mm-hmm.

Those of you who don't remember, but in the early 2004 or so, that was getting to be a thing.

And so people think I worked at DLP, by the way, at TI.

That's always a big misconception I get hit with.

Because I worked at TI and I'm working in displays and stuff.

I...

It's ironic in a way, but TI, you're basically fighting for a limited, they basically have an R&D pool and all the groups are fighting over it.

And DLP soaked up almost all the R&D for a couple of years.

So we had very little money in my group for doing the graphics and imaging and stuff because a lot of that money was getting, at the time, Jerry Junkins decided, hey, DLP was the way to go.

I mean, that sounds agonizingly slow.

It is, which led to the second family, DLP or digital light processing.

This uses the imaging chip out of a standard projector.

So instead of drawing like a pen, it just flashes an image of the entire layer all at once.