Applied Digital Optics: From Micro-optics to Nanophotonics

15

Specifying and Testing Digital Optics

The past 14 chapters have reviewed the various design, modeling and fabrication tools available to the optics engineer to produce digital optics. The next chapter will show practical examples of products, available on the market today, that include such digital optics.

As the number of applications requiring digital optics grows every day, especially in the consumer electronics sector, numerous industries are showing strong interest in such elements, and in the lithographic fabrication and replication of such elements, which are similar to processes in the IC industry. However, for many industries, digital optics remains a small part of their overall final product, even though it might be a key component. Other constituting elements of the final product might include standard macroscopic optics, digital and analog electronics, mechanics, fluidics, software and so on.

Therefore, it is very seldom and also very unlikely that an industry might invest in the various design and various fabrication tools for producing digital optics, especially when lithographic techniques are to be used for the production of such elements (even a small microlithographic cleanroom fab can be very costly).

Thus, more and more industries are turning fabless, or partially fabless, and specify digital optics for external design houses and foundries. This leads to the following questions:

1. How do you specify your digital optics fabrication processes?
2. How do you make ...