1V, 1.13μm pixel pitch Liquid Crystal Driver with Charge-Balancing Scheme for SLM Applications

This work proposes a compact 9T SRAM-based pixel design for low-voltage and high-speed modulator for spatially varying modulation of light (i.e. SLM). To reduce the supply voltage to the CMOS pixel backplane, the operating point is shifted towards the linear window by dynamically pulsing both the top & bottom electrodes in each pixel. A test chip in a standard 40nm CMOS technology was implemented, supporting upto 90 frames/second VGA display. Our testing results demonstrated that the proposed HCS switching scheme is efficient in achieving optical modulation up to 8-bit resolution, making it a viable candidate for state of the art SLMs applications with high frame rate and low power requirements.