The range of aspheres that may be designed is larger than the range of aspheres that may be successfully measured and manufactured. This can lead to frustration for both the optical designer and the optical fabricator. Available polishing tools impose some limitations; full-aperture interferometry imposes other limitations. The optical designer must include constraints in the merit function to encourage the design to respect these limitations if manufacturing is to proceed smoothly. The aspheric surface curvature plot provides key information to understanding which constraints must be added to the merit function to encourage the asphere designs to stay within the portion of solution-space that may be manufactured and measured. There is often little or no performance penalty due to adding these constraints.
Aspheric surfaces provide significant benefits to an optical design. Unfortunately, aspheres are usually more difficult to fabricate than spherical surfaces, making the choice of whether and when to use aspheres in a design less obvious. Much of the difficulty comes from obtaining aspheric measurements with comparable quality and simplicity to spherical measurements. Subaperture stitching can provide a flexible and effective test for many aspheric shapes, enabling more cost-effective manufacture of high-precision aspheres. To take full advantage of this flexible testing capability, however, the designer must know what the limitations of the measurement are, so that the asphere designs can be optimized for both performance and manufacturability. In practice, this can be quite difficult, as instrument capabilities are difficult to quantify absolutely, and standard asphere polynomial coefficients are difficult to interpret. The slope-orthogonal “Q” polynomial representation for an aspheric surface is ideal for constraining the slope departure of aspheres. We present a method of estimating whether an asphere described by Q polynomials is measurable by QED Technologies’ SSI-A system. This estimation function quickly computes the testability from the asphere’s prescription (Q polynomial coefficients, radius of curvature, and aperture size), and is thus suitable for employing in lens design merit functions. We compare the estimates against actual SSI-A lattices. Finally, we explore the speed and utility of the method in a lens design study.
When building high-performance camera lenses, it is often preferable to tailor element-to-element air spaces instead of tightening the fabrication tolerances sufficiently so that random assembly is possible. A tailored air space solution is usually unique for each serial number camera lens and results in nearly nominal performance. When these air spaces are computed based on measured radii, thickness, and refractive indices, this can put a strain on the design engineering department to deal with all the data in a timely fashion. Excel† may be used by the assembly technician as a preprocessor tool to facilitate data entry and organization, and to perform the optimization using CODE V‡ (or equivalent) without any training or experience in using lens design software. This makes it unnecessary to involve design engineering for each lens serial number, sometimes waiting in their work queue. In addition, Excel can be programmed to run CODE V in such a way that discrete shim thicknesses result. This makes it possible for each tailored air space solution to be achieved using a finite number of shims that differ in thickness by a reasonable amount. It is generally not necessary to tailor the air spaces in each lens to the micron level to achieve nearly nominal performance.
We describe the detailed design of a geometrically desensitized interferometer using two transmission diffraction gratings. A number of models of the instrument are used to eliminate object ghosts and stray light contributions. We then investigate analytically the influence of object slope variations on the instrument precision. We show that the part can be located at a measurement location where the metrology is optimized. Analytical and raytracing models demonstrate excellent agreement with experiment.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.