| 摘要 |
Improved beam steering and scanning devices utilize cholesteric liquid crystal (CLC) elements (60) arranged in branches (1-16) to form a logic tree structure. Each branch thereof comprises an active (18) and passive (19) CLC element; the former further comprising a half-wave retarder (61) and an electrode (62) and the latter only the CLC element. Each succeeding branch contains twice as many branches as a preceding branch and, by activating active CLC element electrodes under control of a programmable pulsed source (27), inputs applied to the first stage of a logic tree are delivered as a scanned line of electromagnetic energy or light to the imaging cells of the last stage of the logic tree. By stacking identical logic tree structures with a laser source (17) for each tree, a flat panel imaging array or display panel is formed in which the transmission intensity losses are minimized. In a similar imaging array, inputs-outputs interconnection of the logic trees, where an input logic tree is positioned perpendicularly to the similar logic trees, can be used to produce 2-D and 3-D images by applying a modulation to laser sources from standard television cameras, and cameras designed to capture stereo-displaced images, respectively. |
