High performance single crystal silicon liquid crystal light valve with good image uniformity

This paper is composed of two distinct portions. In the first part, we introduce modified versions of the Hughes silicon liquid crystal light valve with wavefront distortions of better than lambda/4, a resolution of 16 line pairs/mm at 50% modulation concurrent with a contrast ratio of 20:1. In the second portion, we present the results and analysis of a thorough study of the dependence of the performance of this device on its various operating parameters. The contrast ratio of this device was found to be very sensitive to the accumulation phase voltage and pulse width of the driving waveform, while the resolution is strongly dependent on the depletion phase pulse width.