ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 10 -- United States Patent no. 12,292,314, issued on May 6, was assigned to Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co. Ltd. (Osaka, Japan).
"Optical encoder" was invented by Shuichi Nagai (Osaka, Japan) and Masaru Shiraishi (Osaka, Japan).
According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "Optical encoder includes a light source, a reflector, and a light receiver. Reflector has a plurality of reflection areas that include M-code areas and reflects a light from light source by one or more areas, corresponding to n-bits, of M-code areas. Light receiver receives a reflection light from reflector to perform a photoelectric conversion on reflection light. M-code areas has a first face correspo...