Applied Industrial Optics Meeting: An Informative 3rd Day
Julia Majors, PhD, OSA Member, Avo Photonics
To start the last day of Applied Industrial Optics, Rainer Minixhofer presented the impressive wafer level work being done at ams AG in Switzerland developing ambient light sensor architectures that can further miniaturize devices like cell phones. Lisa Franceschini then treated the audience with a demo of 3D technology she is developing at Realvision SRL in Italy. With both hardware and software solutions, and avoiding the use of filters, the unique approach addresses many of 3D technology’s issues to create images true to human vision.
The morning’s “Biofantastic!” session kicked-off with a talk by Bruno Berge from Laclarée in France, who is developing adaptive eyeglasses for those suffering from presbyopia. They glasses incorporate a distance sensor, a novel microfluidic pump that silently varies the liquid lens shape, and the necessary electronics, all in what promises to be a comfortable package. Daniel Hammer, from the Food and Drug Administration in the US, took a closer look at the eye itself – specifically the retina. He shared some of his work advancing the clinical abilities to detect glaucoma using ophthalmic adaptive optics and cellular resolved imaging of individual retinal layers.
Caroline Boudoux continued the session outlining her work to create double clad fiber couplers, as well as the company Castor Optics, Inc. that now sells them commercially. The coupler splits the multimode and single mode signals carried by each fiber to capitalize on the imaging capabilities of each, demonstrating vastly improved results in both OCT and confocal microscopy techniques. Do Kyung Kim, from Pukyung National University presented results of his work measuring temperature-insensitive twist using fiber transmission gratings before Leon van der Graaff, of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands outlined his novel confocal microscopy architecture. van der Graaff’s “Big Data” approach produces gigapixel fluorescence images with the use of multi-life confocal scanning and a tilted area sensor.
The afternoon brought some intellectual snacks to the “CHiPs” session, starting with Jeujen Hu from MIT. Hu presented work developing chip-scale digital Fourier spectrometers, where optical switches provide exponentially scalable configurations of optical path lengths. Martin Priwisch of Fraunhofer IPT in Germany followed with a presentation of their PoLaRole system, which integrates pulsed laser structuring with polygon scanners to deliver continuous photomasking processing. Closing the session, Mark Wade of Ayar Labs in California discussed their system-on-a-chip design that overcomes the bottleneck of current optical input/output (I/O) technologies struggling to keep pace with the exponential growth of bandwidth capabilities. Wade’s optical I/O “chiplets” feature 20 optical transceivers in one chip, and a specially designed fiber array design for ultra-low profile coupling to the chip.
The concluding session, “LIBS Hz,” featured Steve Buckley from Ocean Insight and Andreas Frank from ABB Switzerland Ltd. Buckley described the advantages of using laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) for material sorting. Scrap metal sorting in particular has benefited from its ability to rapidly identify exact composition of individual pieces. Frank’s work with ABB addressed the needs of the automotive industry for monitoring thickness of the multilayer paints applied. Their THz time domain spectroscopy device accurately measures individual layer thickness of both wet and dry paint using the reflected signal of picosecond laser pulses.
