Efficient polarized backlight for transflective liquid crystal display illumination

A collimated backlight was designed for high-efficiency transflective liqud crystal display (LCD) illumination. Additionally, polarization separation was achieved by selective total internal reflection at microgrooves in polymeric foils, which were stretched to be anisotropic materials for easy fabrication and tunable birefringence. A lenticular lens array was then utilized to collect the collimated light of the polarized backlight to further improve light utilization efficiency. Therefore, gains of 2.91 and 1.37 in light utilization efficiency were obtained for transmissive and reflective modes, respectively. © 2005 The Japan Society of Applied Physics.