While we announced this design win on last weeks earnings call, today we issued a press release on the ArcticLink III BX‘s inclusion in the Samsung Beam 2 pico projector-enabled smartphone.

As many of our avid readers know, we’ve long-touted that smartphone processors generally don’t have the ability to support multiple display paths.   As most smartphone have only the single display, the added cost and size requirements of adding a secondary display path to the processor is not desired.  Which is fine, of course, for the majority of smartphones.  However, when an OEM like Samsung wants to differentiate their product with hardware (like a pico), this often runs afoul of standard designs — and this happened in the Beam 2.

Like the on-board display, the pico projector requires a display signal from the processor.  Here’s a basic diagram…

 

Unfortunately, its not as simply as wiring the AP’s output to the inputs of both the embedded display and the pico projector.   They actually require separate, different display interfaces; the only way to accomplish this is via a hardware bridging device like our ArcticLink III BX6.   In this particular case, the interface of the AP matched that of the display, but was different with that of the pico.  The BX6 device passes through the signal to the display, and bridges the signal to the pico as shown below.

This allows the pico and display to run at the same time, with an off-the-shelf proven device that handles all timing and bridging internally, and without the cost of going to a more expensive processor that supports dual outputs of differing standards.

Thanks for reading, and happy to answer questions!