Transmissive liquid crystal light valve for parallelism optical thresholding operation

A transmissive liquid crystal valve for carrying out optical thresholding operations is proposed. it operates in parallel, that is, all the pixels of input are processed together simultaneously. The device is based on an amorphous silicon photoconductor and the features of liquid crystals. it does not require control architecture using very large scale integration (VLSI), so we can achieve a larger aperture ratio, higher resolution (more than 45 lines/mm), and a higher space-bandwidth product (more than 4 x 10(5) pixels). Its response time is about 10 ms. Its processing capacity can reach approximately 2 x 10(7) thresholding operations/s. The light valve does not break the beam propagation path, and can plug and play easily in optical processing and neural network systems. Its design, fabrication, and thresholding features are presented. (C) 1996 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers.