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86 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I MAY 2020 ers are the leaders of the electronics parade, as I have said before; they script the music, and the rest of the industry plays. If the industry hits the occasional discordant note, that's part of the process of making something special in the end—something all involved can celebrate when it is ultimately done right. Summary Things will not always go perfectly on the road from design to finished product. Expecta- tions will not always be met on the first pass, but by making a few simple agreements with ourselves, we can hopefully navigate our way to the desired end with the least amount of angst and frustration. Joe Fjelstad is founder and CEO of Verdant Electronics and an international authority and innovator in the field of electronic interconnection and packaging technologies with more than 185 patents issued or pending. To read past columns or contact Fjelstad, click here. Compound Photonics has announced the wide avail- ability of its high-performance digital backplane to lead- ing microLED developers worldwide for integration into complete microdisplay subsystems. CP re-engineered its market-ready LCoS backplane technology into an innovative constant current drive con- figuration for microLED pixels based on its industry-lead- ing 0.26" diagonal (~3 μm pixel) 1080p display format. MicroLED developers can accelerate their time to market by bonding their devices to a backplane driven by CP's field-proven NOVA display drive architecture to enable complete display subsystems meeting critical AR require- ments for compactness, optical performance and bright- ness with high frame rate, low latency and low power consumption. "Our custom, constant current pixel circuit design pro- vides greater tolerance to forward voltage variation and IR drops in the microLED array resulting in a previously unattainable level of uniformity. It additionally features globally on-the-fly programmable pixel current control that greatly increases the system bandwidth, enabling higher frame rates while maintaining full bit depth," com- mented Ian Kyles, CP Vice President of Electrical/Soft- ware Engineering. "The backplane also has additional steering pixels beyond its native 2048x1080 resolution to enhance alignment/integration of the display within the optical system." MicroLED developers using this backplane can access CP's monolithic integrated display module (IDM) (7.25 x 15.5 x 3.1 mm) with a low pin count interconnect and a di- rect MIPI input packaged into a com- pact subsystem amenable to small- er optical engine size. The IDM inte- grates CP's proprietary NOVA drive architecture's software defined platform to enable customizable frame-by-frame control of video frame rates (up to 240 Hz), bit depth, and other parameters to optimize for low latency, short persistence and low power while maintaining near 100% duty cycle according to type of image content and use case. (Source: Business Wire) Compound Photonics Backplane Enables World's Smallest MicroLED AR Displays