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US 4,376,568 AGranted
Thick film line modulator
AssigneeXerox Corporation
InventorRobert A. Sprague
Life of this patent
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AssigneeXerox Corporation
InventorRobert A. Sprague
Estimating the term…
A thick film line modulator/scanner (50) for use in an electro-optic line printer (14). A light valve utilizes a thin electro-optic layer (212) with the index of refraction of the layer being higher than the neighboring material so that the light can be guided in it. A laser beam (48) is focused into the layer, the beam expanding sideways so that a sheet of collimated light is provided. This light is affected by an array of electrodes (240, 242), consisting of an extended set of individually addressed metal fingers (240) on one side of the film (212), and a broad electrode (242) on the other side of the film. This broad electrode could also be segmented to the individually addressed electrodes. The light diffracted by this electrode set is reimaged onto the recording medium (14) with the zero order diffracted light blocked out, so that each electrode acts as a light modulator for one picture element on the output.
In an electro-optic printer having a multi-gate light valve (12) for phase front or polarization modulating a sheet-like collimated light beam (124) in accordance with input data samples of finite duration representing individual picture elements of an image, and phase or polarization sensitve optics (34) for imaging the modulated light beam onto a photosensitive recording medium (14) as said recording medium advances in a cross-line direction relative to said light-valve, whereby said recording medium is exposed in an image configuration, wherein the improvement is characterized by:
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.