Design of a fiber-optic laser scanning system for a smectic liquid crystal display

This paper describes the design of a system that scans an array of GaAs laser beams over a thermally-addressed smectic liquid crystal cell. The cell is projected onto a 1 m square screen to create a very-high-resolution storage display (8000x8000 pels). The scanning system chosen to achieve this high resolution image uses optical fibers to couple the output of 32 GaAs lasers into a two-column array. The array is imaged onto the LC cell by a small plastic lens which, along with the fiber array, is scanned over the area of the cell by a linear X-Y mechanism. The performance and limitations of this addressing method will be discussed and compared with those of alternate multi-beam systems. © 1983 SPIE.