Beam shaping and speckle reduction in laser projection display systems using a vibrating diffractive optical element

Abstract

The laser has been regarded as the potential illumination source for the next generation of projectors. However, currently the major issues in applying the laser as an illumination source for projectors are beam shaping and laser speckle. We present a compact solution for both issues by using a vibrating diffractive optical element (DOE). The DOE is designed and fabricated, and it successfully transforms the circular Gaussian laser beam to a low speckle contrast uniform rectangular pattern. Under a vibration frequency of 150 Hz and amplitude of 200 μm, the speckle contrast value is reduced from 67.67% to 13.78%, and the ANSI uniformity is improved from 24.36% to 85.54%. The experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and potential of the proposed scheme, and the proposed method is a feasible approach to the miniaturization of laser projection display illumination systems.