Douglas P. Hansen

52.4: New, High Performance, Durable Polarizers for Projection Displays

Wire-grid polarizers are now available for broadband visible applications. This type of polarizer is very attractive for projection display applications because of its high efficiency, high contrast, and extreme temperature and flux tolerance. However, using wire-grid polarizers as drop-in replacements in existing architectures, significantly limits the possible applications of this new polarizer type. As with conventional polarizers, wire-grid polarizers come in a sheet format, but they reflect one polarization rather than absorb it. Therefore, care must be taken in the system design to control this reflected light. Other significant design issues will also be highlighted in this paper. Applied Digital Optics, Inc. and MOXTEK will discuss design issues concerning the use of ProFlux™ wire-grid polarizers in the illumination stages for projection, as well as other suitable applications. Conceptual designs will be presented.

18.3: Invited Paper: The Display Applications and Physics of the ProFlux™ Wire Grid Polarizer

Each year the Society awards the Display of the Year Award to several leading edge display devices or technologies that provide innovative solutions to an information display need. The following paper provides a summary of a 2001 Display of the Year award recipient. The new polarization technology described here enables new solutions to difficult and fundamental problems in the display industry. It is applicable and valuable in all types of Liquid-Crystal (LC) displays or other applications of polarization in information display technology.

52.3: An Improved Polarizing Beamsplitter LCOS Projection Display Based on Wire‐Grid Polarizers

MOXTEK has developed a new polarizer technology for the visible spectrum based on the technology of nanometer-scale wire-grids. They have named their technology ProFlux(tm) Polarizers. These polarizers are extremely durable in the LCOS and transmissive light valve projector environment. They also offer very attractive optical performance characteristics as beam splitters in the imaging path, especially for an LCOS-type system. However, since they are plate beamsplitters, they are not a direct replacement for current cube beamsplitters. The proper optical system architecture based on the MOXTEK ProFlux(tm) technology will exhibit significant improvements in image contrast, contrast uniformity, brightness uniformity, and color uniformity. This paper compares performance of conventional beamsplitter cubes with the ProFlux™ beamsplitter. It suggests optical architectures that favor the characteristics of this new beamsplitter while avoiding the problems characteristic of a plate beamsplitter. Test data on polarizers and example system performance will be presented.

28.4: High-Resolution Stereoscopic TFT-LCD with Wire Grid Polarizer

We developed a 5.5 inch, VGA (640×480×RGB), stereoscopic 3D display using a precisely patterned wire grid polarizer (WGP) with rows of alternating polarization angle. Such a wire grid polarizer is invisible without the polarizer and thus a 2D/3D convertible display can be formed. The proposed structure is free of any limitations on both viewing angle and viewing distance inherent in the conventional stereoscopic displays, whereby enabling several persons to view stereoscopic image simultaneously. Because the proposed structure does not use conventional polarization film of TFT-LCD panel, it can be manufactured with low-cost.

Optical Disc Life Expectancy: A Field Report

The lifetime expectancy (LE) of optical discs has often been determined with accelerated testing. This paper reports on the LE of discs subjected only to normal controlled conditions of temperature, humidity and light.

Plane multilayer amplitude gratings fabrication and measurement: recent results

MOXTEK and its collaborators have developed technology for the fabrication of multilayer soft x-ray diffraction gratings. The diffraction gratings we will discuss here are planar, or lamellar amplitude gratings, with a structure similar to that shown in Figure 1 . The gratings we have fabricated and measured consist of a silicon (100) wafer substrate onto which we spin photo-resist. The photo-resist is patterned holographically and the substrate is then etched using reactive plasma processing techniques. The period, or pitch of these gratings Is 0.293 jim, and the grating active area can be as large as 6 cm x 6 cm. The linespace relationship is approximately 50-50. The substrates are etched until the grooves are about 1 200 A deep. This Is done to place the bottom of the grooves deep Into the substrate where It will not be able to scatter x-ray radiation efficiently. A typical substrate is shown in Figure 2.

Multilayer phase diffraction gratings modeled as a structure in three dimensions

X-ray phase diffraction gratings can be designed to behave in a fashion similar to blazed gratings, directing the majority of the energy into certain desired orders. They should be easy to fabricate using conventional semiconductor production technology, and offer advantages in design flexibility and efficiency over conventional amplitude grating or blazed grating structures. As a multilayered structure, a phase grating has structure in depth as well as across the surface. Most theoretical analyses in the literature treat the embedded structure through simplifying approximations or assumptions. We will discuss a model which treats the embedded structure explicitly using the Fresnel-Kirchhoff integral in the Fraunhofer diffraction limit. This approach produces a set of equations which are identical to the result for an amplitude diffraction grating except for an additional factor which depends on the phase relationships of the various surfaces in the multilayer stack.