In recent years, the viability of liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) technologies has been successfully demonstrated and introduced to the marketplace. The basic structure of an LCoS device is that of a more or less traditional liquid-crystal "sandwich" positioned on top of a CMOS silicon chip. But the lower pixel electrodes are metallic mirrors instead of transparent indium tin oxide (ITO), and the pixel-switching transistors are not the thin-film transistors (TFTs) of traditional liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), but single-crystal CMOS transistors fabricated in the chip. This structure controls the reflection of light that enters the device from the front (or top in Fig. 1), in contrast to the more common LCD structures that control the transmission of light from a source positioned behind the display.
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