Diffractive lens arrays are proposed in this work for application in reflected-light confocal microscopes. They have overcome the limitations between fields of view and resolution of traditional objectives. Experiments of multi-spot confocal imaging in surface metrology and fluorescence microscopy have been demonstrated based on the proposed concepts, which have shown capabilities of high-resolution measurement over a large area.

Semiconductor industry has primarily been driven by the capability of lithography to pattern smaller and smaller features. However due to increasing mask costs and complexity, and increasing tool costs, the state-of-the-art technology in lithography is accessible only to a select few. Zone-plate array lithography (ZPAL) is a novel method of maskless lithography that aims to alleviate some of these issues while offering a solution that can be extended to the limits of nanolithography. In ZPAL, an array of diffractive lenses is used to form an array of spots on the substrate. Each spot is modulated independently by means of spatial-light modulators. This essentially creates a "parallel laserwriter". In addition, this lithography system can be converted into a parallel-confocal microscope, which enables fast, high-resolution imaging. This thesis addresses the performance of diffractive lenses, particularly high-numerical aperture zone plates for lithography and imaging using a combination of experimental and theoretical studies. A novel proximity-effect correction algorithm that was implemented effectively in a ZPAL system is also described. Variations to another diffractive lens known as the photon sieve are proposed. The first ever lithography results performed using these new elements are presented in this thesis.

In 2020 fand der jährliche Workshop des Faunhofer IOSB und the Lehrstuhls für interaktive Echtzeitsysteme statt. Vom 27. bis zum 31. Juli trugen die Doktorranden der beiden Institute über den Stand ihrer Forschung vor in Themen wie KI, maschinellen Lernen, computer vision, usage control, Metrologie vor. Die Ergebnisse dieser Vorträge sind in diesem Band als technische Berichte gesammelt. - In 2020, the annual joint workshop of the Fraunhofer IOSB and the Vision and Fusion Laboratory of the KIT was hosted at the IOSB in Karlsruhe. For a week from the 27th to the 31st July the doctoral students of both institutions presented extensive reports on the status of their research and discussed topics ranging from computer vision and optical metrology to network security, usage control and machine learning. The results and ideas presented at the workshop are collected in this book.

Microoptics is an important enabling technology for many areas of application. In this updated second edition of their modern text and reference book, Stefan Sinzinger and Jürgen Jahns expertly and comprehensively present the basics and applications in microoptics, while incorporating the most important developments in recent years. An absolute must for physicists and electrical engineers, from advanced students right up to designers working in the field.

Proceedings of the 20th Course of the International School of Quantum Electronics held in Erice, Italy, November 14-24, 1996

Confocal microscopes utilize point illumination and pinhole detection to reject out-of-focus light. Because of the point illumination and detection pinhole, confocal microscopes typically utilize point scanning for imaging, which limits the overall acquisition speed. Due to the excellent optical sectioning capabilities of confocal microscopes, they are excellent tools for the study of three-dimensional objects at the microscopic scale. Fluorescence confocal microscopy is especially useful in biomedical imaging due to its high sensitivity and specificity. However, all designs for confocal microscopes must balance tradeoffs between the numerical aperture (NA), field of view (FOV), acquisition speed, and cost during the design process. In this dissertation, two different designs for an array confocal microscope are proposed to significantly increase the acquisition speed of confocal microscopes. An array confocal microscope scans an array of beams in the object plane to parallelize the confocal microscope to significantly reduce the acquisition time. If N beams are used in the array confocal microscope, the acquisition time is reduced by a factor of N. The first design scans an array of miniature objectives over the object plane to overcome the trade-off between FOV and NA. The array of objectives is laterally translated and each objective scans a small portion of the total FOV. Therefore, the number of objectives used in the array limits the FOV, and the FOV is increased without sacrificing NA. The second design utilizes a single objective with a high NA, large FOV, and large working distance designed specifically for whole brain imaging. This array confocal microscope is designed to speed up the acquisition time required for whole brain imaging. Utilizing an objective with a large FOV and scanning using multiple beams in the array significantly reduces the time required to image large three-dimensional volumes. Both array confocal microscope designs use beam-splitting gratings to efficiently split one laser beam into a number of equal energy outgoing beams, so this dissertation explores design methods and analyses of beam-splitting gratings to fabrication errors. In this dissertation, an optimization method to design single layer beam-splitting gratings with reduced sensitivity to fabrication errors is proposed. Beam-spitting gratings are typically only designed for a single wavelength, so achromatic beam-splitting grating doublets are also analyzed for possible use in array confocal microscopes with multiple excitation wavelengths. An analysis of the lateral shift between grating layers in the achromatic grating doublet proves grating profiles with constant first spatial derivatives are significantly less sensitive than continuous phase profiles. These achromatic grating doublets have designed performance at two wavelengths, but the diffraction angles at the two wavelengths differ. To overcome that limitation, scale-invariant achromatic gratings are designed, which not only provide designed performance at two wavelengths, but also equal diffraction angles at two wavelengths.