Karl Guttag

Karl Guttag (published as Karl M. Guttag in his technical papers) is an electrical engineer and display technology analyst. He spent about 20 years at Texas Instruments (TI), where he worked on the TMS9918 video display processor and was chief architect of the TMS340 family of graphics processors, whose TMS34010 Jon Peddie describes as the first programmable graphics processor chip. He was later a founder of Syndiant, a maker of liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) microdisplays for pico projectors. Since December 2011 he has written the KGOnTech blog, which analyzes display devices and, in recent years, concentrates on augmented reality glasses and headsets.

The XR news site MIXED has described him as "known for his critical stance". His published analyses include an estimate that the Microsoft HoloLens 2 delivers about 20 pixels per degree against Microsoft's stated 47, an argument that Magic Leap's fiber scanning display could not plausibly scale to 1080p resolution, and critiques of the Apple Vision Pro as a monitor replacement and of the Meta Orion prototype's waveguide display.

Reviewed 15 October 2026. Career dates, TI/Syndiant/Navdy/RAVN roles, Peddie TMS34010 history, patent, nine papers (Crossref) and the HoloLens 2, Magic Leap, Vision Pro and Orion analyses checked against the cited sources. About review dates.

Education

According to his own biography, Guttag earned a BSEE from Bradley University in 1976 and an MSEE from the University of Michigan in 1977.

Career

Texas Instruments (1977-1998)

Guttag's biography dates his time at TI from July 1977 to May 1998. From 1977 to 1979 he worked on the TMS9918 family of video display processors, known as the "Sprite Chip"; he lists himself as one of the six original engineers on it. With Peter Macourek he described the chip in the paper "Video Display Processor" in IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics in February 1981. His biography also credits him with heading the logic architecture of the TMS 9995 and TMS 99000 microprocessors.

Peddie's history of the TMS34010 states that Guttag began defining the chip after working on the TMS9918 and two 16-bit CPUs, and that memory bandwidth was a critical problem. Guttag's team reached an agreement with TI's MOS Memory group: the team would help define the architecture of video RAM (VRAM), a DRAM with an added shift register, so that it would work in a system, and the memory division would build it. The team also developed the TMS34061, a simple VRAM controller that could be released much sooner than the TMS34010. Guttag is one of six inventors named on US Patent 4,639,890, a TI video display system using memory with parallel and serial access, filed in December 1983 and granted in January 1987. According to Peddie, working TMS34010 silicon was achieved in Houston in December 1985, the first development board shipped to IBM's workstation facility in Kingston, New York, in January 1986, and that same month Guttag demonstrated a working chip to Steve Jobs at NeXT. Guttag co-wrote two 1986 articles about the design in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications: "Requirements for a VLSI Graphics Processor" (with Jerry Van Aken and Michael Asal) and "The Texas Instruments 34010 Graphics System Processor".

From 1990 to 1996, by his own account, Guttag was chief architect of the TMS320C8x (MVP) family of image processors; he presented "TMS320C8x family architecture and future roadmap" at an SPIE digital signal processing technology conference in 1996. His biography also says he contributed to the first synchronous DRAM (SDRAM).

Guttag was named a TI Fellow. He describes himself as the youngest TI Fellow in the company's history, reached at age 33, and dates the title to 1988; Peddie's account places the fellowship in 1991. Peddie also records that Guttag received the NCGA Award for Technical Excellence for his work on VRAM; Guttag's biography lists an NCGA Technical Achievement award for Video RAM work in 1988.

LCOS microdisplays and Syndiant (1998-2011)

After leaving TI in 1998, Guttag moved to display startups. His biography lists him as chief technology officer of Silicon Display Incorporated (1998-2001), which worked on LCOS for near-eye and projector uses, and as president (2001-2010) of Kagutech, where he invented and patented all-digital microdisplay backplane architectures.

He was a founder, director and CTO of Syndiant, a startup that developed LCOS microdisplays for pico projectors. Display Daily reported that Syndiant microdisplays were designed into pico projector products sold by 3M, Philips and AAXA, among others. Writing as Syndiant's CTO in Laser Focus World, Guttag argued that lasers combined with field sequential color LCOS could produce small, focus-free projectors, and compared LCOS pixel fill factors with those of DLP mirrors. He gave an invited paper on high-resolution LCOS microdisplays for pico projectors at the Society for Information Display (SID) symposium in 2010, and the 2011 paper "Laser+LCOS Technology Revolution", written with Shawn Hurley and Bill Mei, was a Distinguished Paper at the 2011 symposium; a journal paper on the same subject with Hurley appeared in the Journal of the Society for Information Display in 2012. A 2011 paper by Dennis Cheng, Dixon Fung and Guttag in Solid State Phenomena noted that small-pixel LCOS was enabling projection engines for phones, cameras and head-mounted displays. Guttag left Syndiant effective 16 December 2011, after seven years at the company.

Navdy (2012-2015)

Guttag was a co-founder and CTO of Navdy, a San Francisco startup that developed an aftermarket automotive head-up display controlled by gestures and voice. Entrepreneur reported in 2014 that CEO Doug Simpson founded Navdy in October 2012 with Guttag as CTO, and that the company had raised US$6.5 million in seed funding in a round led by Upfront Ventures. After Navdy's announcement on 5 August 2014, Display Daily reported that the device was available for pre-order at a limited-time discounted price of US$299, with shipping expected in early 2015 at a retail price of US$499. Guttag's biography gives his tenure at Navdy as May 2013 to January 2015.

RAVN (2018-2021)

Guttag was Chief Science Officer of RAVN, a Boston company in Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch that Y Combinator describes as building a heads-up display for soldiers. His biography lists the role from June 2018 to December 2021 and describes the work as AR headsets for military and first responder use.

KGOnTech

Guttag announced the KGOnTech blog ("Karl Guttag on Technology") on 5 December 2011, describing it as a technology blog with an emphasis on image generation and saying he would try to explain the technology so that the average person could understand it. Its early posts covered pico projectors and LCOS. He has run KGOnTech as a consulting business since January 2012, offering technical and market consulting and litigation support. In a 2023 interview recorded at Augmented World Expo and published by Voices of VR in 2025, host Kent Bye introduced him as an independent analyst of consumer XR display devices, and Guttag said his blog mostly covers see-through AR, display devices and optics. He also wrote "Analyzing Optics' Pivotal Role in Augmented and Mixed Reality Displays" for the SID magazine Information Display in 2023. As of October 2026 the blog remains active; recent posts include an analysis of the Meta Ray-Ban Display (October 2025) and a September 2026 article on silicon carbide waveguides.

Analysis of AR and VR displays

In 2016 Guttag studied videos released by Magic Leap. Display Daily reported that he first concluded the demonstration unit most likely used an OLED microdisplay, later suggested it might use LCOS, and considered DLP less likely. In January 2018 he published "Magic Leap Fiber Scanning Display (FSD) - 'The Big Con' at the 'Core'", which argued that a spiral-scanned fiber could not plausibly reach 1080p: by his calculation the fiber would need a scan path of about 10.17 meters, and at 120 Hz a peak velocity more than 14 times the speed of sound.

For the HoloLens 2, which uses laser beam scanning, Guttag published a multi-part display evaluation. In Part 2 (July 2020) he estimated the effective resolution at about 600 lines, or 20 pixels per degree, compared with the 47 pixels per degree that Alex Kipman cited at the headset's February 2019 announcement.

MIXED summarized his February 2024 assessment of the Apple Vision Pro: he judged its display good compared with almost every other VR headset, but "very poor compared to even a modestly priced modern computer monitor". In October 2024 he began a series on Meta's Orion prototype and its silicon carbide waveguide display. MIXED reported that he had not tried the glasses himself, cautioned that the invited press often lacked display expertise, pointed to visible eye glow in videos, estimated that at least 50% of ambient light was blocked, and noted Meta's acknowledged 13 pixels per degree.

Selected publications

Year	Title	Co-authors	Venue
1981	Video Display Processor	Peter Macourek	IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics
1986	Requirements for a VLSI Graphics Processor	Jerry Van Aken, Michael Asal	IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
1986	The Texas Instruments 34010 Graphics System Processor	Mike Asal, Graham Short, Tom Preston, Richard Simpson, Derek Roskell	IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications
1996	TMS320C8x family architecture and future roadmap	None	Proceedings of SPIE vol. 2750
2010	High Resolution Microdisplays for Pico Projectors (invited paper)	None	SID Symposium Digest
2011	Laser+LCOS Technology Revolution (Distinguished Paper)	Shawn Hurley, Bill Mei	SID Symposium Digest
2011	Digital High Resolution Small Pixel LCOS Technology	Dennis Cheng, Dixon Fung	Solid State Phenomena
2012	Laser + LCOS projection-technology revolution	Shawn Hurley	Journal of the Society for Information Display
2023	Analyzing Optics' Pivotal Role in Augmented and Mixed Reality Displays	None	Information Display

See also

• Liquid crystal on silicon
• Microdisplay
• Laser beam scanning
• Waveguide display