DLP Mirrors

Here's another entry of some images from when I was back in school. One day, my professor (Bill Carmichael at MATC Madison) brought in a DLP chip from a DLP projection television. The concept of how a DLP television works is quite unique. The chip is set up as an array of tiny little mirrors. Each one moves individually to project tiny bits of the image. With most DLPs, each mirror is responsible for one pixel.


Due to a mishap in the sample preparation of the chip, some of the mirrors fell off of their mechanical posts. This turned out to be a happy accident as it exposed the machinery so that more than just an array of mirrors could be seen. I captured these images on a Hitachi 2700 Scanning Electron Microscope. Click on each image to enlarge them.