A LCOS microdisplay driver with frame buffer pixels Sangrok Lee, James C. Morizio * , Kristina M. Johnson Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, Box 90291, Durham, NC 27708, USA Received 27 September 2001; accepted 8 May 2002 Abstract An 8-bit liquid crystal on silicon microdisplay driver for projection display has been designed and fabricated using AMI 0.5 lm double-poly, triple-level metal CMOS process. The driver includes frame buffering at the pixel level, which presents optimized optical characteristics for field sequential color operation, and a mixed mode gray scale method which implements distinct 256 gray levels per color with a simpler driver architecture. Ó 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. 1. Introduction Liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) displays combine high birefringence and low operating voltage liquid crystalline (LC) materials with crystalline silicon VLSI technology that provides a flexible technology to control and hold the state of the LC in a high resolution, small sized display [1]. The crystalline silicon VLSI technology is well recognized as a competitive alternative for active matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) [2]. The advantages of the crystalline silicon over polysilicon lie in higher electron mobility producing better electron characteristics and more mature technology available off the shelf. Furthermore, a complicated column and row driver circuits, and pixel arrays can be achieved through high level integration yielding a compact sized display with relatively low cost. Due to the low cost and compact system size achievable for display systems using LCOS technology, these devices have been Information Sciences 149 (2003) 3–11 www.elsevier.com/locate/ins * Corresponding author. 0020-0255/02/$ - see front matter Ó 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Inc. PII:S0020-0255(02)00239-6