US Patent 11921306 Diffraction grating array for wide-angle illumination

An incident optical beam illuminates a subset of contiguous array of diffraction gratings on a substrate and produces one or more diffracted output beams. The grating array can be arranged so that (i) multiple incident beams result in a contiguous composite solid angle of far-field illumination, (ii) multiple output beams arising from any one incident beam do not overlap in the far field, or (iii) both. The gratings of the array can be arranged to produce a desired far-field illumination intensity profile. The grating array can be arranged so as to suppress or eliminate laser speckle arising from the output beams.