Over the last few years, DLP® Products at Texas Instruments, Inc. has been developing a MEMS-based phase-only spatial light modulator that we call the Phase Light Modulator or PLM. The device which shares many of the process steps with the DLP micromirror device consists of a vertically actuated mirror on top of a CMOS array. The current reflective device provides enough vertical range to be suitable for visible wavelengths. This paper discusses a number of metrics important to the performance of a phase-only spatial light modulator and the corresponding characteristics of the PLM. The metrics include diffraction efficiency, number of phase levels, resolution, speed, and die flatness. The paper also discusses in depth recent design improvements such as increasing the number of phase levels to improve efficiency and reduce image noise. Recent lifetime test results collected over more than 1000 hours are also presented. Finally, there is a discussion of our possible approaches to testing the device in a high-volume production environment.
Piston‐mode Fourier based optical imaging created using an adaptation of the base DLP® Products torsional, spatial light modulator technology is presented. Technology, advancements and performance metrics such as, actuation speed, efficiency, and pixel coupling are shown for this 10.8 μm pitched pixel array. Device potential includes upwards of 5.7kframes/sec actuation.
A prototype of a Phase Spatial Light Modulator (PLM) device has been developed and demonstrated using DLP Micro-ElectroMechanical System (MEMS) based technology. Designed for a visible (405nm to 632nm) laser, this device uses an array of individually-addressable, digitally-controlled PLM micromirrors that can be addressed to multiple discrete vertical positions. The MEMS superstructure process flow used for DMD micromirrors was adapted to enable manufacturing this device on top of an existing DLP technology CMOS device. The prototype has demonstrated good uniformity across the array and the ability to steer light using phase light modulation. A discussion of some initial performance metrics as well as potential applications will be presented.
Texas Instruments’ digital mirror device (DMD) uses thousands to millions of individual micromirrors to direct light as a Spatial Light Modulator (SLM). The Tilt-Roll-Pixel (TRP) is currently the smallest DLP Products pixel node at 5.4μm pitch. The small micromirror size, which enables fast switching speed, and precise tilt angles, exploits this speed on a system level to double or quadruple the resolution by using super-resolution projection. Super-resolution projection overlays multiple sub-sampled images, each shifted on the screen by a fraction of a pixel, and as long as the shifting occurs at a rate faster than the critical flicker fusion threshold, the human visual system will act as a temporal low pass filter and naturally integrate all low-resolution SLM images into a single super-resolution result. This paper will discuss the operation of the TRP node, how this node can be operated more quickly, how super-resolution projection works, and how we modified the optical architecture to leverage the switching speed for super-resolution projection.
For the past five years, Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology from Texas Instruments has made significant inroads in the projection display market. With products encompassing the world's smallest data & video projectors, HDTVs, and digital cinema, DLP is an extremely flexible technology. At the heart of these display solutions is Texas Instruments Digital Micromirror Device (DMD), a semiconductor-based light switch array of thousands of individually addressable, tiltable, mirror-pixels. With success of the DMD as a spatial light modulator in the visible regime, the use of DLP technology under the constraints of coherent, infrared light for optical networking applications is being explored. As a coherent light modulator, the DMD device can be used in Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexed (DWDM) optical networks to dynamically manipulate and shape optical signals. This paper will present the fundamentals of using DLP with coherent wavefronts, discuss inherent advantages of the technology, and present several applications for DLP in dynamic optical networks.
This paper discusses an approach for applying IR target modeling to aid model-based automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms. The paper also presents results based on experiments with real long-wavelength IR data. The algorithm uses an IR thermal prediction model to approximate the (long-wave IR) expected target signature. The algorithm then uses the predicted signature or some features based on it to locate or classify the target within the image.
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