Abstract

Personal computers can now be used for serious optical design. Currently there is much good optical design software available for the IBM PC, Macintosh, and their compatibles. This software can provide high-resolution graphics, design optimizations, tolerance analyses, and image evaluations. The HOEs are now being considered for serious optical designs in which HOEs are intermixed with conventional optics. To the authors’ knowledge, none of the commercially available optical design software can analyze a generally defined HOE. Most of the software can only deal with simple holograms generated by two-point sources. Since a complete analysis and optimization are an important and necessary part of an optical design procedure and since, unfortunately, these processes are laborious and difficult, one naturally wants to take advantage of the software's capability as much as possible to perform these tasks.

© 1987 Optical Society of America