#MEMS: "TI's LightCrafter senses without touching"

The next most promising frontier in emerging ubiquitous MEMS applications, structured light illumination (SLI), is poised to revolutionize metrology applications by removing the need for touch with MEMS that both micro-miniaturizatize and increase the precision of conventional solutions.


Being pioneered by Texas Instruments with its million-mirror digital light processors (DLPs), SLI works by projecting moving stripes of light onto objects, then measures the deformity of the reflected patterns using algorithms to reconstruct their 3-D shapes. So far TI's biggest customers are OEMs manufacturing touch-free fingerprint scanners which can identify people without requiring the traditional ink-blotter protocol. Besides revolutionizing biometric-, facial-, dental- and medical-scanning, SLI is also opening whole new frontiers in DLP applications—from industrial inspection systems to scientific instrumentation of all kinds.
Further Reading