Abstract

We report on the design and fabrication of high diffraction efficiency, high damage threshold space-variant and space-invariant optical fan-out and interconnects in dichromated gelatin (DCG). We have fabricated a range of high efficiency (>90%) lenslet arrays for the visible and near infrared with near diffraction-limited operation capability and excellent uniformity (better than 2%). In addition we have been successful in combining the flexibility in design of the computer-generated holograms with high diffraction efficiency of DCG to fabricate compact holographic elements which can perform several functions simultaneously. One such device is capable of fan-out, light focusing, and spectral filtering of the input beam. By employing various pre- and postprocessing techniques we have increased the optical damage threshold of these holographic optical elements (HOEs) to >100 W cm⁻². This is of particular importance when large fan-out (>1 → 100 × 100) components are required to power large arrays of optical logic gates.

© 1989 Optical Society of America