Balancing optical system design and optical fabrication chain design

The design of optical systems has two main tasks: (a) their optimal optical performance and (b) their optimal producibility; whereby the latter has to comply with the "magic triangle" of optical performance quality, fabrication cost and manufacturing throughput. Unfortunately, for decades there has been a major mismatch in designing optical systems. On one hand, optical system designers are well supported by State-of-The-Art optical design software tools while on the other hand, the design of optical fabrication chains and their cost, which is strongly interlinked with the parameters and tolerances of the optical system design, is still today completely depending on humans experiences and knowledge. Consequently, while optical system designs are well optimized for optical system performance, their optimization for optimal producibility and manufacturing chain design is not possible during the design phase of the optical system itself. This paper reports on the application of a novel approach to optical design strategies. Within a Swiss research project called PanDao, a new type of software tool was developed enabling the integration of producibility analyses and fabrication chain optimizations into the optical design process. PanDao reads in lens parameters and tolerances as described in the ISO 10110 standards and generates the optimal fabrication chain at minimum cost, taking more than 300 optical fabrication techniques into account.