Abstract

Integrated optical disk pickup heads with small size and light weight are of great interest. They not only reduces the size of the optical disk drives but also improves its ruggedness and data transfer rates. By eliminating discrete bulk optical elements, the assembly cost can be greatly reduced. Two types of integrated optical disk pickup heads have been proposed and tested: waveguide approach with focusing gratings¹ and diffractive planar micro-optics approach.² Waveguide approach suffers from high coupling loss and difficulty of fabricating high performance lenses, while planar optics approach is very sensitive to variations of substrate thickness.

© 1995 IEEE