Band 1, Heft 1-2

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Consumer devices increasingly contain embedded optical systems. Many of these optical systems are based on molded plastic optical elements. This tutorial provides background on the design and manufacture of such systems. Consideration is given to the material issues, manufacturing concerns, and typical design trade-offs and constraints that often accompany plastic consumer optics.

For high volume consumer products using optical technology, plastics injection molding is a very suitable technology. In optical component fabrication, astonishing results are be booked. However, to achieve success, excellent performance is needed in mastering different technologies such as polymer processing, evaporated coatings, tool making, ultra-precision turning of metals and optical metrology.

Injection molding offers a cost-efficient method for manufacturing high precision plastic optics for high-volume applications. Optical surfaces such as flats, spheres and also aspheres are meanwhile state-of-the-art in the field of plastic optics. The demand for surfaces without symmetric properties, commonly referred to as freeform surfaces, continues to rise. Currently, new mathematical approaches are under consideration which allow for new complex optical designs. Such novel optical designs strongly encourage development of new manufacturing methods. Specifically, new surface descriptions without an axis of symmetry, new ultra precision machining methods and non-symmetrical shrinkage compensation strategies have to be developed to produce freeform optical surfaces with high precision for high-volume applications. This paper will illustrate a deterministic and efficient way for the manufacturing of ultra precision injection molding tool inserts with submicron precision and show the manufacturing of replicated freeform surfaces with micrometer range shape accuracy at diameters up to 40 mm with a surface roughness of approximately 2 nm.

At present, compact camera modules are included in many mobile electronic devices such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants or tablet computers. They have various uses, from snapshots of everyday situations to capturing barcodes for product information. This paper presents an overview of the key design challenges and some typical solutions. A lens design for a mobile phone camera is compared to a downscaled 35 mm format lens to demonstrate the main differences in optical design. Particular attention is given to scaling effects.

Modern phase shifting interferometers enable the manufacture of optical systems that drive the global economy. Semiconductor chips, solid-state cameras, cell phone cameras, infrared imaging systems, space based satellite imaging and DVD and Blu-Ray disks are all enabled by phase shifting interferometers. Theoretical treatments of data analysis and instrument design advance the technology but often are not helpful towards the practical use of interferometers. An understanding of the parameters that drive system performance is critical to produce useful results. Any interferometer will produce a data map and results; this paper reviews some of the key issues to minimize error sources in that data and provide a valid measurement.

This article provides an overview of optical design for high-power LEDs and collimating light, and it will detail all the key issues related to physics, design and manufacturing.

Integrator rods and optical arrays are the most frequently used components in illumination design for homogenizing radiation fields. However, these two standard components are very different in their performance and characteristics. This tutorial is aimed to illustrate the operation principle, basic design rules and the performance of those components. It should guide the optical designer towards the optimum choice for the individual illumination application. To illustrate the functionality of integrator rods and optical arrays simultaneously in angle and position, the concept of phase space is introduced. Here the effect of the homogenizing components can nicely be illustrated in the form of phase space transformations. This offers new insight and a different perspective onto the employment and characteristics of those elements.

Although optical coating deposition techniques have been perfected over decades to prepare optically homogeneous dense coatings with smallest surface roughness, nanostructuring of optical coatings has proven as an effective mechanism to further enhance their performance while reducing their thickness in special cases. Therefore, nanostructure effects can be tackled as additional degrees of freedom for coating design, and can even lead to useful property combinations that are inaccessible to ‘classical’ coatings prepared on the basis of the traditionally available coating materials. Examples include metal island films as building blocks for spectrally selective absorber coatings for color management or solar energy conversion purposes, as well as motheye structures for antireflection coatings and the combined optimization of optical and non-optical coating properties.

With the global financial crisis affecting funding for space systems development, customers are calling for lower cost systems. Yet, at the same time, these lower cost systems must have increased thermal response to operational environments and load survivability. We submit that single crystal silicon (SCSi) meets both of these requirements. This paper will highlight some key SCSi material properties, discuss the opportunities that led to the development of McCarter processing methods, and present the latest steps in the manufacturing path of McCarter Mirrors using SCSi, GFB (glass frit bonding) and MSF (McCarter super finish), including the concept drawing of a one meter SCSi lightweight mirror, which together sets up the last step toward a lower cost, high performing one meter SCSi space optic.

Temporal shaping of femtosecond pulses with microoptical retroreflector arrays was studied experimentally. It was demonstrated that pulses of variable duration and multiple pulses of variable delay can easily be generated by varying the tilt angle of the compact device. The corresponding pulse characteristics were determined by second order autocorrelation measurements.

No abstract available