Mosaic Digital Illumination System are a patented instrument platform built around MEMS Digital Mirror Devices (DMD). DMDs were developed at Texas Instruments in 1987 and are now in widespread use in digital projectors and other display devices.

Simultaneous illumination of multiple regions of interest in real time and with zero delta acquisition time
Mosaic exploits DMD in a proprietary programmable platform, integrated with scientific light sources including lasers, LEDs and arc lamps, and operates from 360 to 800 nm. It is offered with a range of high performance microscope adapter optics and can be integrated with CLSM, spinning disk and wide field imaging modalities.

High speed frame switching (60 Hz) makes Mosaic suitable for many dynamic applications including bleaching, uncaging, photoswitching, optogenetics and constrained illumination. Variable intensity distributions can be achieved by rapid gating of mirror patterns.

Mosaic has a unique capability to illuminate in parallel an arbitrary number of complex regions (sometimes called “zero delta t”) that sets it apart from galvo-based devices and makes it especially attractive for uncaging, photoswitching and light activation. It is a unique tool for the study of optically stimulated intra and inter-cellular activity in neuroscience and physiology, as well as for function-structure studies with photoswitching fluorescent proteins. Mosaic uses dichroic coupling to the microscope light path and is therefore capable of simultaneous stimulation and imaging.