Abstract

The U.S. Army Missile Command has recently funded the development of driver electronics to allow the Semetex magnetooptic spatial light modulator (MOSLM) to be operated at video frame rates and addressed with a standard RS170 video from a camera. The driver electronics consists of a single PC board which fits in an IBM XT. The video signal from a camera is fed to the board, binarized, and sampled down to a 128 × 128 image and then output to the MOSLM. The binarization threshold as well as the sampling frequency can be set in the controller software for the board. The first field of a video frame is binarized, sampled, and written to the MOSLM. The scene is printed and displayed during the second video field and the process repeats itself with the next frame.

© 1989 Optical Society of America