ALEXANDRIA, Va., Oct. 28 -- United States Patent no. 12,455,429, issued on Oct. 28, was assigned to NIDEC SANKYO Corp. (Nagano, Japan) and PANASONIC AUTOMOTIVE SYSTEMS Co. LTD. (Kanagawa, Japan).
"Lens unit" was invented by Yasuo Tsuruoka (Nagano, Japan), Akinori Yamamoto (Nagano, Japan), Toshio Shirotori (Nagano, Japan), Katsumi Umeda (Osaka, Japan), Masanori Tanikawa (Osaka, Japan) and Shinya Okada (Osaka, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A lens unit 1 includes a plurality of lenses aligned in a row along an optical axis L and a lens holder 2. A first lens L1 located the closest to an object-side La includes an object-side lens surface 11, an image-side lens surface 12, and an image-sid...