Panel Discussion

If we were given the choice of having either an optically-addressed or an electrically-addressed spatial light modulator (SLM), most of us here today would choose the electrically-addressed one because of its greater speed and flexibility. Yet it is clear that as the size of SLMs increases, optically-addressed SLMs will be more advantageous than electrically-addressed ones. Why? You will never have a l000xl000 pixel electrically-addressed SLM whose pixels can all be addressed at once, because you cannot put a million wires onto a SLM. But you can address a million points on a SLM by means of Optics. NTT has recently announced a Ferroelectric Liquid-crystal light valve with twice the resolution of the existing commercial LCLVs and a hundred times faster, with a time resolution of 70 microseconds. Assuming the size is about the same (about 25 cm2), and assuming each pixel can be individually addressed, the capacity of this device comes to about 101 1 operations per second.