Dynamic calibration for improving the speed of a parallel-aligned liquid-crystal-on-silicon display.

The speed of most parallel-aligned liquid-crystal-on-silicon (LCoS) spatial light modulators (SLMs) is limited to the video rate of their drivers, which is a limitation for high-speed applications. However, the LCoS SLM presented here has a driver allowing a frequency range of up to 1011 Hz. Using the static phase modulation characterization and the static lookup table (LUT), the phase modulation characterization versus frequency shows that the SLM can operate at around 130 Hz or even higher for small phase changes and at 32 Hz for extreme phase changes. A dynamic calibration is carried out, and we propose a method allowing an increase of the frame rate while maintaining a maximum phase modulation of 2pi. Experimental results of dynamic diffractive optical elements displayed on the SLM at a frame rate of 205 Hz show that the dynamic LUT improves the reconstruction quality.