Diffraction gratings were designed to generate multiple beams for the real-time optical interconnection in free-space using a liquid crsytal television. Multi-level phase gratings consisted of stepped phase value, 0 to 2$pi$, and generate a 5$ imes$5 spot array, and V-shaped spot patterns which have a maximum diffraction efficiency of 78.84%. Simulated annealing technique was used to determine phase states of each pixel having uniform intensity and high diffraction efficiency. Through the optical interconnection experiments, we compared the diffraction characteristics of beam paterns obtained by binary-level, four-level, and eight-level phase gratings.