Abstract

Liquid Crystal (LC) over Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) electrically addressed reflective Spatial Light Modulators (SLM) have been identified as very powerful, combining the very attractive features of both the LC and VLSI technologies [1]. LC has very low power requirements for high optical modulation effects and VLSI can allow high yield and compact modulators with a high level of functionality on-chip. The device has an LC cell fabricated on top of a custom designed VLSI silicon backplane (see figure 1). The backplane contains an array of pixel memory elements, pixel mirrors and addressing circuitry. The controllable pixels in the SLM can switch the liquid crystal to achieve modulation. A number of these devices have been developed and demonstrated in a variety of optical systems such as compact displays [2], optical correlators [3] and as reconfigurable holograms [4]. A constructed SLM device in a standard chip package is shown in figure 2. In this example, the chip in the center is 1cm² (the package itself is ≈ 3 × 3 cm².

© 1995 Optical Society of America