Lockheed Missiles & Space Company, Inc.

Bruce J Herman

George Gal

William Walter Anderson

Dean M Shough

Marc A Stiller

A flat panel display incorporates an array of color separation microlenses. Each color separation microlens in the array is a single, micro-optical element which disperses color by orders to distinct color spots and focuses these color spots to related liquid crystal sub-pixels located in a common plane. Substantially all of the areas of the color spots fall directly and only on the liquid crystal sub-pixels. Little, if any, light energy is lost by falling outside areas occupied by the individual liquid crystal sub-pixels. Because the color separation microlenses provide the color separation, no color filter is required in the flat panel display. Eliminating the color filters eliminates light losses which are incurred when transmitting light through a color filter. The flat panel display makes more efficient use of light transmitted through the components of the display than was possible with prior art flat panel displays.

Flat panel display

A micropolarization assembly has a beam-shaping microlens wafer and a polarization wafer assembly. The micropolarization assembly utilizes the full illumination incident on the beam-shaping microlens wafer and aligns all of the light to the same polarization at the outlet of the micropolarization wafer assembly.

Micropolarization apparatus

A color separation microlens is fabricated to be a single micro-optical element made up of a color separation grating integrated with a refractive lens. The color separation microlens separates the spectrum into distinct color spots and focuses these spots to a common plane. The spots fall at the locations of the different diffraction orders of the grating. The color separation is done by the grating, and the focusing is done by the lens. The color separation microlens can be fabricated as a monolithically integrated element (an element in which the grating and the lens are combined to a single surface) and can also be fabricated as a dual-sided thin wafer (a wafer in which the grating is on one side and the lens is on the other).

Color separation microlens

A monolithically integrated, micro-fabricated optical device for use in photonic applications has at least one waveguide surface configuration which cannot be fabricated by binary processing. The optical device comprises a plurality of layers of substrate materials. The material in at least one layer has an index of refraction different from the index of retraction of the material in an adjacent layer. A waveguide surface is formed at an interface between the layers and has a configuration fabricated by use of a gray scale mask.

Gray scale microfabrication for integrated optical devices

Wavefront correction apparatus for correcting a stepped wavefront output produced by certain angles of scan and by certain positions of scan in scanning microlens arrays includes anamorphic transfer optics with diffractive corrections. The transfer optics form the outputs of all of the unit cell trains of the microlens arrays into a unique, separate, linear image at each position of scan of the scanning array. A stepped wavefront corrector is positioned in the path of each linear image, and selected thicknesses of the material in the stepped wavefront corrector are effective to vary the times of optical passage through the stepped wavefront corrector in amounts to restore the wavefront to a continuous, unstepped form at the outlet of the plate.

Growing community of inventors

Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Bruce J Herman