Anamorphic and Local Characterization of a Holographic Data Storage System with a Liquid-Crystal on Silicon Microdisplay as Data Pager

In this paper, we present a method to characterize a complete optical Holographic Data Storage System (HDSS), where we identify the elements that limit the capacity to register and restore the information introduced by means of a Liquid Cristal on Silicon (LCoS) microdisplay as the data pager. In the literature, it has been shown that LCoS exhibits an anamorphic and frequency dependent effect when periodic optical elements are addressed to LCoS microdisplays in diffractive optics applications. We tested whether this effect is still relevant in the application to HDSS, where non-periodic binary elements are applied, as it is the case in binary data pages codified by Binary Intensity Modulation (BIM). To test the limits in storage data density and in spatial bandwidth of the HDSS, we used anamorphic patterns with different resolutions. We analyzed the performance of the microdisplay in situ using figures of merit adapted to HDSS. A local characterization across the aperture of the system was also demonstrated with our proposed methodology, which results in an estimation of the illumination uniformity and the contrast generated by the LCoS. We show the extent of the increase in the Bit Error Rate (BER) when introducing a photopolymer as the recording material, thus all the important elements in a HDSS are considered in the characterization methodology demonstrated in this paper.