Coherent backlight unit using holographic optical elements for full-color flat-panel holographic display

We propose the coherent backlight unit (BLU) using Holographic Optical Element (HOE) for full-color flat-panel holographic display. The HOE BLU consists of two reflective type HOEs that change the optical beam path and shape by diffraction. The diverging incident beam is transformed to the collimated beam which has a very small diffraction angle (7.5°) by HOE 1 (H1) in order to illuminate the whole display. This collimated beam is converged to a point at a distance from the glass substrate by HOE 2 (H2). As a result, the diverging incident beam is converted to a point light by H1 and H2. When the high resolution Spatial Light Modulator (SLM) displaying Computer Generated Hologram (CGH) is illuminated by HOE BLU, the hologram image is displayed at a view point near focal point. Practically, we fabricated the full color HOE BLU for 5.5" flat panel holographic display by using the proposed design. At least 5.5" size of HOE is required to illuminate the whole panel. For this reason, we recorded 150 mm x 90 mm size HOE on the 10 mm thickness glass substrate. This HOE BLU exhibits a total efficiency of 8.0% at Red (660 nm), 7.7% at Green (532 nm), 3.2% at Blue (460 nm) using optimized recording conditions for each wavelength. Finally, a bright full color hologram image was achieved.