After struggling for more than a decade to perfect analog micromirrors, Hornbeck was convinced that a radical new approach to the control of light was essential to overcoming the performance and image stability limitations inherent in his analog designs. Early in 1987 he had a major breakthrough with his invention of the DMD, the chip that would become the basis for the trademarked DLP technology from Texas Instruments. Hornbeck’s invention of rugged, fast, highly-reflective digital micromirrors integrated on a chip would in time create a revolution in projection imaging technology for home, office, entertainment, education and mobile applications. Who could have predicted in 1987 that twenty years later, film projectors, the last major imaging technology to yield to the semiconductor age, would be replaced in thousands of theaters around the world by digital micromirrors on a chip?

The DMD manipulates light digitally, its tiny mirrors tilting thousands of times a second to create an image by directing pulses of light through a projection lens and onto a television, presentation, or movie theater screen. DLP® technology uses this highly versatile imaging technique to create a remarkable variety of display products that are virtually immune to image degradation. These range from the tiniest DLP pico-projectors embedded in cell phones, to a wide selection of DLP front-projectors and rear-projection HDTVs, to the largest projectors in the world, including TI’s DLP Cinema® projectors that light up nearly 11,000 theater screens globally, with more than 4,000 screens offering digital 3-D. At the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games under the most adverse environmental conditions, sixty-three DLP Cinema projectors were combined to create the largest projected image in the history of visual technology, the 46ft (14m) high x 1,640 ft (500m) long overhead “raceway,” viewed live (or delayed) by an estimated 800 million people as they watched the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

Hornbeck holds a series of seminal patents that form the foundation for DMD technology. These include the first practical methods based on microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) concepts for manufacturing high-density arrays of micromirrors on an integrated circuit in a conventional wafer fab (1983); the Digital Micromirror Device, a MEMSbased array of fast, reflective, digital light switches monolithically integrated along with a digital address circuit on a silicon chip (1987); the surface lubrication technology for the DMD (1990); and others. As of 2007, he holds 33 U.S. patents in CCD, IR detector, and MEMS technology; others patents are pending.

Hornbeck has received numerous national and international awards and honors, including an Emmy® Engineering Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences “for digital micromirror technology.” In May 2009 he was honored by induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the DMD. Together with the CRT and LCD, the DMD is only the third display device whose inventor has received National Inventors Hall of Fame status. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), a Fellow of the International Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE), and an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. Hornbeck and his wife, Laura, reside on a 32-acre property in the country near Van Alstyne, Texas, north of Dallas. They have two sons, Jason and David.

National and International Awards and Honors:

(1995) Germany’s Eduard Rhein Foundation Technology Award; (1997) England’s Rank Prize; (1998) Emmy® Engineering Award from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences; (1999) Karl Ferdinand Braun Prize from the Society for Information Display; (2001) Electronic Imaging Honoree of the Year Award from the SPIE; (2002) The David Sarnoff Medal Award from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers; (2002) elected Fellow SPIE; (2004) Small Times Magazine Best of Small Tech Lifetime Achievement Award; (2004) Daniel E. Noble Award from the Institute of Electrical & Electronic Engineers (IEEE); (2005) Progress Medal from the Photographic Society of America; (2006) elected Fellow IEEE; (2007) elected to the National Academy of Engineering; (2007) Progress Medal from the Royal Photographic Society; (2007) Prize for Industrial Applications of Physics from the American Institute of Physics; (2009) inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for his invention of the DMD.