Taking into account recent developments and present trends in devices and component technologies, the future development of electrically addressed liquid crystal spatial light modulators is considered. In particular, the combination of single-crystal-silicon active backplane and chiral smectic C liquid crystal technologies is shown to be promising. The ultimate limitations of such technologies for producing faster devices of higher complexity and functionality are assessed, and an advanced device, presently under development, is described.
We present a fast white-light interference method for measuring surface depth profiles at nanometer scales. Previously reported white-light profilers have relied either on path difference scanning or on spectral analysis of the reflection from a fixed interferometer. We show that by performing this spectral analysis with an imaging Fourier transform spectrometer, the high speed of spectral techniques may be combined with the simple data interpretation characteristic of the scanning method. Giving experimental results from a profiler based on this principle, we show that real-time visualization of surface profiles is possible and we report measurements with a repeatability of approximately 5 nm rms. We also demonstrate good agreement with stylus profiler measurements.
The construction of a 50- x 50-pixel spatial light modulator based on an active silicon backplane and using the hybrid field effect in nematic liquid crystals as the light modulating process is described. The design and electrical evaluation of the pixel array, which is fabricated in 1.5-microm nMOS and has an individual memory cell within each pixel, are discussed. The performances of a 16 x 16 prototype SLM and the new 50- x 50-pixel device are compared to provide an indication of progress toward high performance spatial light modulators with onboard pixel memory.
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