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Advanced Optics Using Aspherical Elements
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Description
Modern optical systems rely on leading-edge production technologies, especially when using aspherical optical elements. Due to the inherent complexity of aspheres, all efforts to push the technological limits are risky. Thus, to minimize risk, clear decisions based on a good understanding of technology are indispensable. This compendium is written as an optical technology reference book for development and production engineers. With contributions from worldwide experts, this book aids in mitigating the risk in adopting new asphere production technologies.
Keywords: lens, optical design, asphere, optical fabrication, metrology, optical coating, lens assembly, thin film
Table of Contents
- Front Matter Open Access [ PDF ]
- 1. Introduction Open Access [ PDF ]
- I Review and Summary
- 2. Basic Considerations [ PDF ]
- 3. Applications [ PDF ]
- 4. Materials of Aspheres [ PDF ]
- 5. Processing Technologies [ PDF ]
- 7. Coating Technologies Open Access [ PDF ]
- 8. Assembly Technologies [ PDF ]
- 9. Future Trends [ PDF ]
- 10. Mathematical Formulation [ PDF ]
- II Experts' Contributions
- 11. Applications [ PDF ]
- 13. Processing Technologies [ PDF ]
- 15. Coating Technologies [ PDF ]
- 17. Editor and Author Biographies Open Access [ PDF ]
- Back Matter Open Access [ PDF ]
Excerpt
1.1 Motivation
Modern optical systems rely on leading-edge production technologies, especially for the development of aspherical optical elements. Many activities, worldwide, are targeted to the development of production technologies for aspheres that are as accurate, reliable, and cost-attractive as those for spherical lenses. Today, aspherical lenses of reasonably good quality are still up to 10 times more expensive than the corresponding spherical ones, which indicates how far we are away from achieving this. We must understand the current technologies to identify improvement potential.
We will describe several examples of applications and technologies, which give a good understanding along the value-added chain. Our priority is to understand general principles. Therefore, we disregard high-volume applications such as handy phone cameras, which on the one hand apply these principles but on the other hand use very special solutions for mass production because of the high competitiveness of these market segments.
This compendium is primarily written to be an optical technology reference book for development and production engineers. Due to the inherent complexity of aspheres, all efforts to push the development of technologies are still risky. To minimize risk, clear decisions based on a good understanding of technology are therefore indispensable at the management level.
Decision-makers for the implementation of optical technologies need to have technological background information available in a short and compressed way. This also holds for strategy management consultants, who have to propose solutions and prepare decisions. Today it is rather difficult to get access to all the information, and very often only experts can extract and interpret the relevant part that is needed. We see a real need for a reference book, and the best way to pull together authentic information is to involve experts in the field of optics.
We therefore asked leading engineers from renowned optical companies to join as authors. Their contributions are summarized in standardized templates, which help to understand a variety of technologies in a common way. To facilitate reading, all templates have a unified structure and present their content in a brief yet comprehensive form. Links to more detailed information lead to short presentations of essentials.
The experts' contributions help to understand the fundamental features in an easily accessible way by
• Presenting the “state of the art” in optical design and production technology,
• Pointing out trends and ongoing activities, and
• Performing benefit and risk analysis of different production technologies.
The focus on aspheres includes the standard processes for producing spherical components, but it also points out the true challenges for optical technologies to achieve the same reliability and cost structure in aspheres.
Based on this concept, the compendium is divided into two parts. The first part, “Review and Summary,” is an introduction to the technologies, but it also summarizes the detailed results of the templates. The second part, “Experts' Contributions,” is the collection of templates, which were each created by their particular authors.
Both parts are organized into sections that reflect the typical workflow to produce optical systems with aspheres. We start with “basic considerations,” comments on “design and application cases,” and subsequently treat “materials,” “surface processing,” “metrology,” “coatings,” and “assembly.” We finish Part I with a technology forecast, “Future Trends,” where we try to predict the progress of all technologies involved. This outlook is rather speculative and reflects our own opinions and the personal opinions of our experts.
The user can profit from the dual structure in the following ways:
• It allows a focused reading of the basics but also provides important details.
• It enables understanding of the differences between sometimes competing, but mostly complementing, technology variants.
• The Internet links may be used for further reading of publications, patents, or industrial information materials.
All these features should enable the reader to navigate through the sections and find the most appropriate combination of materials and processes for a particular application.
This book relates to a fast-moving technology. Having this in mind, we asked our experts to add web links for immediate and further reading in more detail.
©2008 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers
