Small phase pattern 2D beam steering and a single LCOS design of 40 1 × 12 stacked wavelength selective switches

Two-dimensional beam steering by small, square, phase patterns as small as 50 × 50 pixels on a phase-only liquid crystal on silicon (LCOS) device is experimentally verified as suitable for the application of wavelength selective switches (WSSs), in terms of the diffraction efficiency and steering accuracy. This enables a proposed highly functional and versatile stacked switch architecture, where 40 independent 1 × 12 WSSs can be realised on a single 4k LCOS device. They can be configured to support a 1 × N WSSs with N≤144, or an N × N wavelength crossconnect with N≤12.