FOCUSING FAN-OUT ELEMENTS BASED ON PHASE-MATCHED FRESNEL LENSES

A novel approach for designing and fabricating focusing fan-out elemen ts is presented. It is based on an area-sharing arrangement of planar lenses. Due to the low number of parameters and their well-defined phy sical meaning, it is possible to find solutions with both a high effic iency and a low uniformity error using simple and fast optimization pr ocedures. Results of numerical simulations and experiments agree well. Conspicuous properties include a high fabrication fault tolerance, th e suitability for low-cost mass production, and the possibility of rea lizing very compact microoptical systems.