Slim Mobile Lens Design Using a Hybrid Refractive/Diffractive Lens

This paper reports a slim mobile lens design using a hybrid refractive/diffractive optical element. Conventionally a wide field of view (FOV) camera-lens design adopts a retrofocus type having a negative (-) lens at the forefront, so that it improves in imaging performance over the wide FOV, but with the sacrifice of longer total track length (TTL). However, we chose a telephoto type as a baseline design layout having a positive (+) lens at the forefront, to achieving slimness, based on the specification analysis of 23 reported optical designs. Following preliminary optimization of a baseline design and aberration analysis based on Zernike-polynomial decomposition, we applied a hybrid refractive/diffractive element to effectively reduce the residual chromatic spherical aberration. The optimized optical design consists of 6 optical elements, including one hybrid element. It results in a very slim telephoto ratio of 1.7, having an f-number of 2.0, FOV of 90°, effective focal length of 2.23 mm, and TTL of 3.7 mm. Compared to a comparable conventional lens design with no hybrid elements, the hybrid design improved the value of the modulation transfer function (MTF) at a spatial frequency of 180 cycles/mm from 63% to 71-73% at zero field (0 F), and about 2-3% at 0.5, 0.7, and 0.9 fields. It was also found that a design with a hybrid lens with only two diffraction zones at the stop achieved the same performance improvement.