Patent ID: 7357513

Claim:
A light engine for use in a display system, comprising: a multi-color laser source including a set of vertical extended cavity surface emitting semiconductor lasers (VECSELs) each having intra-cavity frequency doublers to generate visible light via second harmonic frequency conversion of light at a fundamental frequency generated by a semiconductor gain element within each VECSEL, each VECSEL having a super-linear dependence of second harmonic light power to fundamental frequency power with the fundamental frequency power further being dependent on thermal effects in the semiconductor gain element, said multi-color laser source configured to illuminate a digital high speed spatial light modulator having an array of elements for spatially modulating light in which the intensity of displayed pixels depends upon the number of switching periods per frame that individual elements of said digital spatial light modulator are switched into an on-state with the switching periods further organized into color sub-frames; and a controller to synchronize the operation of said set of VECSELs to operate in a pulsed mode to illuminate said digital spatial light modulator, said controller scheduling the operation of said set of VECSELs to operate in a color sequential order with a regulated power level of visible light for each color sub-frame of a frame and color contamination below a pre-selected level; a temporal width of a single color sub-frame selected to be sufficiently small compared to a human visual response time such that a visual artifact associated with color sequential operation is eliminated and where there are at least about 2 6 possible sub-frames per frame and at least one pulse of a selected color per color sub-frame.