- Principal Investigator - Aleksandar Radic and Adam Postula
- Start date - 2006
- Goal - The goal of this project is to develop a platform for remote experiments with MEMS devices and particularly with micro mirror devices.
- Overview of project - The micro mirror spatial-light modulators (SLMs) are well established as display devices in large screen projector equipment and recently also gained wide spread use in direct switching of data streams in fiberoptic switches and reconfigurable optical interconnects. Reconfigurable optical interconnects present a technology that could enable flexible and high performance communication in heterogeneous multi-chip architectures. One of the examples of a system where conventional electrical interconnects are pushed to the limit is a Play-Station 3 in which bus handles up to 35 GB/s. System designers appreciate that the performance of the next-generation computer systems can be seriously limited by the performance of the interconnect systems. This technology is quickly developing and usually not well covered in undergraduate curriculum. The proposed experiment should generate interest in MEMS and SLM technology among both undergraduate and postgraduate students.
The use of SLMs as beam steerering and multicasting elements for reconfigurable interchip optical interconnection can be well illustrated by a simple optical system used to implement computer generated binary dynamic-reflection holograms. The developed platform will be based on micro mirror devices, control electronics and optical hardware purchased from commercial suppliers. In the future we will consider development of control equipment based on Field Programmable Logic devices in order to extend the functionality and improve performance of the platform. Initial part of the experiment will allow students to control the mirror, and interactively observe the results via microscope. A number of different actions will be implemented via switches and sliders including switching and steering the individual mirrors. Also, the students should be able to observe micro mirror elements, their movements and physical design.
In the second part of the experiment more advanced applications will be implemented on the same hardware. The hardware setup of the platform, shown in Fig. 1, consists of a semiconductor laser, CCD camera, polarisers, non-polarising beam splitter, collimating and imaging optics, micro mirror device, controller and a PC. All those elements are available commercially. The software for direct control of the micro-mirror is also available from the suppliers of the control hardware. A collimated laser beam is transmitted through a beam splitter and incident on the micro mirror device. The phase pattern written on the micro-mirror will phase modulate the beam. The modulated beam is then optically Fourier transformed to form an intensity distribution on a CCD camera.
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