Single-chip holographic beam steering for lidar by Digital Micromirror Device with angular and spatial hybrid multiplexing

A Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) based holographic beam steering technique is reported which multiplexes fine-steering binary amplitude gratings with a coarse-steering programmable blazed grating. The Angular Spatial Light Modulation (ASLM) technique encodes the spatial pattern of the binary amplitude grating at the same plane as the angular modulation set by a phase map of the DMD-based beam steering technique. The beam steering technique is demonstrated at 532 nm and implemented into a 905 nm lidar system. The results of the lidar system tests are presented, achieving a 44° field-of-view, 0.9°×0.4° (H×V) angular resolution, 1 m max distance, 1.5 kHz sampling, and 7.8 FPS video. Scalability techniques are proposed, including max distance increases to over 100 m.