Design of CAD for fabrication of lenslet array used in adaptive optical system

Abstract

Among kinds of wavefront sensors, the Hartmann-Shack sensor is mostly used in the adaptive optical system. The lenslet array, which is fabricated based on the binary optical technique, is the core component of Hartmann-Shack, and influences the performance of the whole system directly. In this paper, a CAD application, which employs freewares only, is presented for the design of Hartmann-Shack lenslet array, which can give not only parameters for fabrication, but also the fabrication process flowchart. The program is portable, and runs on most flavours of Unix, as well as on Windows and Mac OS X. In addition, it is extendable so that new design algorithms can be added.Among kinds of wavefront sensors, the Hartmann-Shack sensor is mostly used in the adaptive optical system. The lenslet array, which is fabricated based on the binary optical technique, is the core component of Hartmann-Shack, and influences the performance of the whole system directly. In this paper, a CAD application, which employs freewares only, is presented for the design of Hartmann-Shack lenslet array, which can give not only parameters for fabrication, but also the fabrication process flowchart. The program is portable, and runs on most flavours of Unix, as well as on Windows and Mac OS X. In addition, it is extendable so that new design algorithms can be added.