Ferroelectric liquid-crystal digital scanner

The design and performance of a digital scanner based on ferroelectric liquid-crystal switchable wave plates and passive nematic liquid-crystal prisms are reported. The liquid-crystal prisms function as low-cost, integrable, lowangle birefringent prisms. A 1 x 64 scanner was built with -5.3 dB of average loss. By using an active filter, the limiting mispolarization cross talk of the scanner was reduced from -13 dB to less than -25 dB.