Abstract

The non-mechanical inertialess optical scanner is a critical building block in numerous optical applications ranging from laser communications, optical storage, and three dimensional (3-D) displays. Perhaps, the ultimate goal of the scanner industry is to realize a low cost 3-D scanner that can rapidly and efficiently scan a volume with 1000 x 1000 x 1000 or a billion points [1]. This also means that such a scanner must have a billion degrees of freedom, a non-trivial task from a device control point of view. In this paper, we describe, perhaps for the first time, a solution to achieving this billion points scanner [2]. Our approach is to use planar active (electronically programmable) and passive thin- film polarization sensitive optics in a compact LEGO-like stacking or cascaded binary switching architecture to form the desired 3-D scanner. We call our approach BOPSCAN Technology: Binary Optical Polarization Sensitive Cascaded Architecture Network Technology. Our non-mechanical optical scanner features include microsecond regime beam reset times, low (e.g., mW levels) control power and low complexity drive electronics, large (several cms) or small (few hundred microns) scan beam active aperture sizes, very large number of scan beams (over a billion), very few control signals (e.g., only 30 signals for a billion point scan), high throughput efficiency (e.g., > 50 %), and most importantly, potential for low cost.

© 1998 Optical Society of America