The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 05, 2021
Filed:
Apr. 03, 2020
Facebook Technologies, Llc, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Maxwell Parsons, Seattle, WA (US);
Shane Colburn, Redmond, WA (US);
Yingfei Jiang, Redmond, WA (US);
Andrew Maimone, Duvall, WA (US);
Erik Shipton, Kenmore, WA (US);
Guohua Wei, Redmond, WA (US);
Oleg Yaroshchuk, Redmond, WA (US);
FACEBOOK TECHNOLOGIES, LLC, Menlo Park, CA (US);
Abstract
A tunable liquid crystal (LC) device includes an LC layer between a pair of reflectors forming an optical cavity. The reflectors include conductive layers for applying an electrical signal to the LC layer. One of the conductive layers may include an array of conductive pixels for spatially selective control of the effective refractive index of the LC layer. The phase delay introduced by the LC layer may be greatly increased or magnified by placing the LC layer into the optical cavity. This enables a substantial reduction of the LC layer thickness, which in its turn enables very tight pitches of the LC pixels, with a reduced inter-pixel crosstalk caused by fringing electric fields, as well as faster switching times. A tight-pitch, fast LC device may be used as a configurable hologram or a spatial light modulator.