Patent 7768895 was granted and assigned to Panasonic on August, 2010 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
To reduce the size or thickness of an optical pickup device and an optical disk drive, an optical pickup device includes a light source that radiates laser light; a condensing member that condenses the laser light onto a recording medium; an optical member that reflects some of the laser light radiated from the light source into the condensing member and transmits the rest of the radiated laser light; and a light receiving sensor that receives the rest of the laser light transmitted through the optical member so as to detect an amount of laser light.