Patent ID: 7770796

Claim:
A laser beam despeckling device comprising: a laser diode for producing a laser beam having a central characteristic wavelength, a coherence, and a coherence length; a diode current drive circuit for producing a diode drive current to drive said laser diode and produce said laser beam; a high frequency modulation (HFM) circuit for modulating said diode drive current at a sufficiently high frequency to cause said laser diode to produce spectral side-band components about said central characteristic wavelength, and reduce the coherence as well as coherence length of said laser beam; and an optical beam multiplexing (OMUX) module for receiving said laser beam as an input beam, and generating as an output beam, a plurality of laser beam components that are recombined to produce a composite laser beam having substantially reduced coherence for use in one or more applications where a substantial reduction in speckle pattern noise is achieved.