Optoelectronic multiplexer for digital data processing based on liquid crystal pixels and optical fiber elements

In this work, we present an optoelectronic digital multiplexer 4:1 based on a multipixel nematic liquid crystal cell. This device uses two optical control signals to select one among four possible optical data inputs. These data signals are generated by four red LEDs, which are guided through plastic optical fiber towards liquid crystal pixels. For our purpose, only four pixels of the cell will be used to modulate the optical signal across them. Each pixel will be addressed by a square waveform coming from the conditioning circuit managed by a microcontroller system. The electronic control allows the multiplexer to work as simple two input logical gates such as AND, NAND, OR, NOR, XOR and XNOR. The operation time of the device is limited by the response time of LC cell that is in the millisecond range.