Intellectual Property Law

US Patent 7336412 - Micromirror adaptive optics using piezoelectric actuation

By blaisemouttet

Micromirrors have found numerous applications in displays, fiber optic switching, and 3D imaging. Typically the micromirrors are electrostatically actuated but this patent proposes a piezoelectric actuator for driving the micromirror in adaptive optics applications to generate a higher actuation stroke with smaller voltage. Claim 1 reads:

1. A microcontrollable, deformable mirror comprising: a mirror membrane to which a two dimensional pixel map is assigned; and a plurality of controllable piezoelectric microactuators forming two dimensional pixel map, each of the microactuators being coupled to the mirror membrane and separately controllable to selectively deform at least a portion of the mirror membrane corresponding to a pixel in the two dimensional pixel map.

Full post as published by TinytechIP on March 03, 2008 (boomark / email).