Main Program Page

S2: Fundamentals of Display Optics

Dr. Pochi Yeh

Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, California 93106
Phone: (805) 893-3981
Fax: (805) 893-3262
Pochi@ece.ucsb.edu

Abstract

The short course is aimed at teaching the fundamentals of display optics, including optical technologies, operation principles and analysis of flat-panel displays (e.g., LCDs, OLEDs) with an emphasis on liquid crystal displays. The topics include polarizers, birefringence, Poincaré sphere, Jones matrix, electro-optical properties of liquid crystals, TN-LCD, VA-LCD, IPS-LCD, compensators, colors, viewing angles, light efficiency, brightness enhancement, light extraction, etc.

Instructor Bio:

Pochi Yeh obtained his B.S. in physics from the National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1971. After 2 years of military service, he came to the U.S. to pursue his graduate studies. He obtained his Ph.D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1977 with a dissertation on nonlinear optical wave mixing in gaseous media and optical properties of periodic layered media.

Before he joined the ECE faculty at UCSB in 1989, Dr. Yeh was the Principal Scientist of the Optics Department and Acting Department Manager of Applied Optics at Rockwell Science Center in Thousand Oaks, California, where he carried out research in the areas of electro-optical devices, liquid-crystal displays, nonlinear optics, optical phase conjugation, and optical computing. Dr. Yeh is known for several important contributions in optics and photonics, including the development of a matrix method for optics of layered media, extended Jones matrix method for liquid-crystal displays, and the theory of wave mixing in nonlinear media. In the area of applications, he is the originator of several new photonic device concepts, including photonic crystal waveguides, thin-film compensators for viewing-angle improvement in liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), birefringent dispersion filters for underwater optical communications, phase-conjugate optical gyroscopes, reconfigurable optical interconnection, parallel image subtraction, and optical learning machines. Dr. Yeh was named "Engineer of the Year," at Rockwell Science Center and received the Leonardo da Vinci Award in 1985. He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Photonics Society of Chinese-Americans (PSC). Dr. Yeh received the Rudolf Kingslake Medal and Prize from the International Optical Engineering Society in 1989. Dr. Yeh is the author and coauthor of over 400 technical papers, 30 U.S. patents, and the following five textbooks:
Optical Waves in Crystals, (with Amnon Yariv, Wiley, 1984), Optical Waves in Layered Media, (Wiley, 1988), Introduction to Photorefractive Nonlinear Optics, (Wiley, 1993), Optics of Liquid Crystal Displays (with C. Gu, Wiley, 1999), and Photonics: Optical Electronics in Modern Communications, 6th Edition, (with Amnon Yariv, Oxford, 2006).

Dr. Yeh's current research interest includes nonlinear optics, holography, display optics, and polarizers, and birefringent media, optical communications, and fundamental optical properties of photonic crystal structures.