Abstract

Although analysis of diffractive optical elements (DOEs) is critical to an understanding of the technology, equally important for their widespread application is an understanding of their design or, in counterpoint to analysis, their synthesis. The problem of design is essentially a casting of a designer's understanding of physics into an optimization problem: the DOE is to be determined so that it achieves some desired performance, preferably optimally, subject to the constraints of fabrication.

© 1996 Optical Society of America