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LCD inventors honoured

by on11 February 2009

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Lead to the laptop boom

 

A boffin who came up with the first liquid crystal displays has been inducted into the US National Inventors Hall of Fame. George Heilmeier, 73, worked on the first liquid crystal displays at RCA Laboratories in Princeton.

Heilmeir thought that when the technology was developed in the 1960s it would lead to flat panel TVs but at that point integrated circuit technology hadn't made enough progress then. Another inventor who has been inducted is Larry Hornbeck, 66, for his work on a digital micromirror device, or DMD, which is an array of extremely small mirrors linked to a silicon chip. His breakthrough  of directing light pulses on the mirrors through a lens has been used for a range of applications from inkjet printer heads to digital movie projectors.

Hornbeck, who still works for Texas Instruments, said projection technology might soon be part of cell phones.

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