SBIR-STTR Award

Liquid crystal based optical phased arrays are highly promising among modern approaches to realize large aperture agile scanning mirrors for passive and active optical remote sensors. The variety of such arrays (dynamically written pixels, prisms, lenses) suggests their high potential to overcome limitations of mechanical and electro-mechanical scanning imaging systems. First, by their nature, liquid crystal based devices are electronically switchable and eliminate any need for mechanical movements, provide such benefits as a fast speed, lightweight, low power consumption, high accuracy, reliability, and insensitivity to vibrations. To their advantage, the mentioned characteristics provided by liquid crystal materials are as a given. Second, specifically to one of the approaches described in this proposal - a sequence of three micro-lens arrays, with one in the middle dynamically shifted with respect to the others, presents a highly promising solution to create large apertures and large sweep angles non-mechanical scanning mirror for an airborne optical sensor. The device promises to provide any pattern of the scans and the correction for aircraft motions, air turbulence, and other disturbing factors. Also, making this technology suitable for fabrication on display production lines will significantly shorten the transition from the research and prototyping to the mass production.

Benefit:
Liquid crystals as reliable optical materials already demonstrated their success in opening a more than 150 billion units/year industry of traditional liquid crystal displays. They made possible a revolutionary transition from CRTs (with all the drawbacks of their weight, size, and power consumption) to modern displays, cell phone screens, and TVs. These materials continue to impress us by providing opportunity for building flexible displays and 3D-image displays. At the same time, we are witnessing the innovative role of liquid crystals in many non-display related devices. For example, they substitute solid state materials in microwave radars for military applications. Creating a liquid crystal lens with electrically changeable focus offers unprecedented opportunities in optical industry. Regarding to the outcome of this project, liquid crystal based scanning mirrors will find virtually unlimited market from consumer home security and fire alarm systems and scanning devices to more sophisticated, such as artificial eyes and LIDAR systems.

Keywords:
large sweep angle, large sweep angle, large aperture, Liquid Crystals

New large aperture wide beam steering device is proposed. This device is based on specific type of liquid crystal technologies and expected performance is not only wide beam steering, but also fast enough steering without using any mechanical moving parts. Unlike typical liquid crystal based technologies, this particular technology would enable polarization free beam steering. This gives more light throughput efficiency. Although most of liquid crystal technologies require single linearly polarized light switching, newly developing liquid crystal driving mode technology would enable up to 90% use of incident non-polarized light. This project includes couple of challenging technical development such as polarization-free switching, fast enough optical response (~ 1 ms) and wide enough beam steering. Fast optical response will be realized by i-CORE's specific liquid crystal material technologies, and wide beams steering will be realized by large spatial distribution of liquid crystal refractive indices in conjunction with specific integrated liquid crystal panel design such as fine pitch patterned electrode structures, and/or blazed grating structures.

Benefit:
Liquid crystal based wide beam steering technology is expected to attract many varieties of applications such as military uses for detecting invisible entities, traffic control including safety monitoring devices, and so on. One of the distinguished benefit of this target product is no mechanical moving parts. This feature enables robust enough application for harsh environmental uses such as automobile, airplane, train and so on. In addition to the robust design, compact and low power consumption device nature will be good fit to many other applications.

Keywords:
polarization-free, large aperture, Liquid crystal, fine pitch pattern, blazed grating, Fast Response, wide beam steering, Beam Steering, Polarization free, fast response steering, liquid crystal device