National Semiconductor had 2 new technologies it wanted to build into full-functional Android tablet dev kits for sales and partner business development: sequential color displays and beam forming audio.

NSC’s audio beam forming speaker had special IP for doing sound manipulation via an array of speakers. For this 16:9 tablet application we used 8 drivers of varying sizes below the display to optimize for cinematic audio experiences.

NSC’s sequential displays were unique in that the backlight RGB in sequence (similar to DLP) so the LCD was only B/W and matched to each color. The benefit is that the LCD has 100% open for each color, while a conventional LCD with white backlight has 33% open for each color. The advantage was 3x on brightness which would be 3x improvement on battery usage.

8-channel beam forming audio for personalized cinematic audio