Duke blue may stand out a little more strikingly on the next wave of high-definition televisions if a company co-founded by Pratt School of Engineering Dean Kristina Johnson has its way.
Methods of displaying data have started to take off, following the dramatic technological advances in data devices over the past decade. Photonics, a technology involving light manipulation that has garnered attention lately at Duke, is playing a part in these advances.
One such innovation, a new method for displaying HDTV pictures, is being developed by ColorLink, Inc., a company that Johnson co-founded while she was still a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
"This technology is a replacement for cathode-ray tubes," said John Korah, a product development engineer at ColorLink. "It's a technology that effectively allows virtually anyone in the world to be a light engine manufacturer. There aren't many people who can make cathode-ray tubes."
Earlier this year, Thomson Multimedia, a subsidiary of RCA, formed partnerships with ColorLink and three other companies to produce an HDTV set. In its part of the agreement, ColorLink will provide a projection component that separates colors for contrast using the polarization of light.
"It takes in light and splits it into red, green and blue," Johnson said. "It puts each pattern into an overall picture, and then overlaps them."
The image polarization and subsequent overlapping processes differ from standard CRTs, the traditional TV sets that display images by firing electrons at a luminescent screen.
New displaying methods could take advantage of the 1997 Federal Communications Commission standard for HDTV, which calls for the replacement of analog broadcast signals with digital ones. This change will allow more content to be transmitted and offers potentially higher picture quality.
Johnson believes that ColorLink's HDTV product can stand out with its sharp image display.
"The contrast is really high--higher than anything else out there," Johnson said. "We plan to work on [the technologies involved] to make the whole system better."
One such improvement would be reducing the size of the HDTV set. Current diagonal lengths are as long as 50 inches.
"The smaller you get, the truer the dot, and sometimes it's harder to get smaller pixels," Johnson said.
Although Korah believes that these new displays will erode some of the market share of CRTs, he does not foresee a disappearance of the technology.
"They'll always be around--they're a very mature technology," Korah said.
With the creation of the University's new Fitzpatrick Center for Photonics and Communication Systems, Duke researchers will be exploring other ways of manipulating photons, the smallest discrete units of light. Beyond image display, potential applications of photonics could include using light to transmit data--a development that could lead to faster data exchange on the Internet.
"We're going to have five labs with lots of people working in them," Johnson said of the center's exploration into photonics.
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