Laser-based projectors are gaining increased acceptance in mobile device market due to their low power consumption, superior image quality and small size. The basic configuration of such micro-projectors is a miniature mirror that creates an image by raster scanning the collinear red, blue and green laser beams that are individually modulated on a pixel-bypixel basis. The image resolution of these displays can be limited by the modulation bandwidth of the laser sources, and the modulation speed of the green laser has been one of the key limitations in the development of these displays. We will discuss how this limitation is fundamental to the architecture of many laser designs and then present a green laser configuration which overcomes these difficulties. In this green laser architecture infra-red light from a distributed Bragg-reflector (DBR) laser diode undergoes conversion to green light in a waveguided second harmonic generator (SHG) crystal. The direct doubling in a single pass through the SHG crystal allows the device to operate at the large modulation bandwidth of the DBR laser. We demonstrate that the resultant product has a small footprint (<0.7 cc envelope volume), high efficiency (>9% electrical-to-optical conversion) and large modulation bandwidth (>100 MHz).

Date Published: 17 February 2010
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7582, Nonlinear Frequency Generation and Conversion: Materials, Devices, and Applications IX, 758205 (17 February 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.844857

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7582:
Nonlinear Frequency Generation and Conversion: Materials, Devices, and Applications IX
Peter E. Powers, Editor(s)