Liquid Crystal Functional Devices and Application to Optical Processing

Introduction One of the potential capabilities of optical signal handling technologies lies on the parallelism of signal transmission through free space. Encoding the digital signal as 1D or 2D pattern requires a device with multiple pixels and sufficient uniformity. Liquid crystal panels offer such performance although the speed of response is typically on the order of milli second, not always sufficient for signal processing, but sometimes useful in such applications as network routing, or preprocessing step in hybrid computing schemes. The recent maturity of liquid crystal panel fabrication technology is also a great attraction, although major efforts so far are devoted almost solely to the TV and terminal display. The authors are making an effort to create a new category of liquid crystal devices for beam handling and signal processing based on the available liquid crystal device technology . A new proposal of phased array beam deflector utilizing distributed resistive el