Advanced Liquid Crystal on Silicon Optical Phased Arrays

Non-mechanical beamsteering eliminates the need for massive optomechanical components to steer the field of view of optical systems. This benefit is to come in the form of compact, low-power, light-weight optical phased arrays that provide better control with greater flexibility in their steering capability than their mechanical counterparts. Currently, high-speed, high-resolution, fully-programmable non-mechanical beamsteerers with good optical efficiency do not exist forcing system developers to use mechanical systems for controlling the field of view of an optical system. This proposal offers a means to correct this deficiency. Recent advances in VLSI foundry processes have made possible high-resolution, light-efficient backplanes capable of driving electro-optic modulators with high-voltage signals. The high-voltage signals provide the excitation to achieve sub-millisecond response times with a wave of phase modulation. By combining high-speed phase modulators with high-voltage VLSI backplanes, compact spatial light modulators become available for the various applications that need this type of performance such as optical signal routing or beamsteering, active diffractive optics and adaptive wavefront correction.