Driving method to reduce data refresh rate in nematic liquid crystal optical phased array

The structure of a storage capacitor in nematic liquid crystal optical phased array causes the data refresh rate to be higher than the liquid crystal switching frequency, which demands a high data bandwidth. A novel driving method was therefore proposed to reduce the data refresh rate. Without using a storage capacitor, the proposed method uses digital scanning instead of conventional analog scanning. Furthermore, digital scanning is able to drive all pixels in parallel and transmit driver data only once for one frame. 1-D nematic liquid crystal optical phased array was used to test the novel driving method. During the experiment two frames of driver data were alternately transmitted at a refresh rate of 10 Hz, and diffraction patterns were acquired. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can be used to keep the data refresh rate lower than the liquid crystal switching frequency.