Non-iridescent transmissive structural color filter featuring highly efficient transmission and high excitation purity

Abstract

Nanostructure based color filtering has been considered an attractive replacement for current colorant pigmentation in the display technologies, in view of its increased efficiencies, ease of fabrication and eco-friendliness. For such structural filtering, iridescence relevant to its angular dependency, which poses a detrimental barrier to the practical development of high performance display and sensing devices, should be mitigated. We report on a non-iridescent transmissive structural color filter, fabricated in a large area of 76.2 × 25.4 mm2, taking advantage of a stack of three etalon resonators in dielectric films based on a high-index cavity in amorphous silicon. The proposed filter features a high transmission above 80%, a high excitation purity of 0.93 and non-iridescence over a range of 160°, exhibiting no significant change in the center wavelength, dominant wavelength and excitation purity, which implies no change in hue and saturation of the output color. The proposed structure may find its potential applications to large-scale display and imaging sensor systems.