Optical beam steering (BS) has multiple applications in fields like target seeking and tracking, optical tweezers, billboard displays and many others. In this work, a two-dimensional beam deflector based on blaze gratings is presented. Phase-only 1D blaze gratings have been prepared using maskless Direct Laser Writing (DLW) resulting in high-resolution structures in indium-tin oxide (ITO) coated glass wafers. The device is composed of two identical 1D liquid crystal (LC) cells cascaded orthogonally back-to-back, with a resultant active area of 1.1 × 1.1 mm². The 1D cells have been prepared with 144 pixels each with a 7.5 µm pitch. The total 288 pixels are driven by a custom made 12-bit Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) electronic driver, allowing for an arbitrarily high resolution. The system performance is documented, and the efficiency of the system has been tested. A maximum diagonal steering angle of ± 3.42° was achieved.

Electrically tunable phase gratings are able to steer an incoming light beam without employing movable parts. Here, we present the design and implementation of a 2D beam steering device by cascading two orthogonal 1D liquid crystal (LC) based phase gratings, each having an array of 72 rectangular individually controlled pixels and driven by a custom 12-bit Pulse-Width Modulation (PWM) electrical driver. High-resolution structures in glass wafers coated with transparent Indium-Tin Oxide (ITO) have been prepared using Direct Laser Writing (DLW) techniques. With DLW, a high number of pixels can easily be drawn with an interpixel space of less than 3 μm, leading to devices with a high fill factor. The active area of the cascaded device is 1.1 × 1.1 mm². We present a 72 × 72 point efficiency map corresponding to a maximum diagonal steering angle of 1.65°. Special attention has been paid to make the device compatible with space application by avoiding electronics in the active area.