Multi-phase modulation for nematic liquid crystal on silicon backplane spatial light modulators using pulse-width modulation driving scheme

In phase modulating diffractive optical devices multi-phase modulation provides improved performance over binary modulation. Multi-phase modulation can be achieved by using nematic liquid crystal spatial light modulators (NLCSLM) with pulse-width modulation driven from a binary CMOS backplane. This paper presents the characteristics and the driving scheme of the 512 x 512 Si-backplane SLM for the implementation of the multi-phase modulation while comparing the binary and four-level phase holograms. Diffraction efficiency of 39.7% for binary grating and 72.9% for four-level blazed grating were obtained at the spatial frequency 1.56 lines/mm. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.