Optics¶
Optical system design, as a business, has become very costly to run over the past few years for freelancer CDMO (contracted development & manufacturing officer), especially without purchasing authority and a host lab to support the R&D. Nowadays, I mostly compose/evaluate optical schematics, and verify them against OEM-provided specifications. If you find anyone who wishes to ship the instrument on loan to my office, I am more than willing to pick up the slack. Please feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.
Optical design review services:
On-axis confocal free-space / few-mode fiber optics design, optimization, and fabrication;
Common path multi-modal imaging path design and characterizations; (quantitative) phase contrast, widefield fluorescence, confocal, and structured illumination;
High-power (up to 3,500 milli-Watt) illumination optics prototyping (i.e. Research-grade only, not for commercialization);
System integration with real-time compute engines (mostly Nvidia Ampere micro-architecture) and beam-steering electronics (electro-optics or acousto-optics of up to 400MHz bandwidth).
Conduct trade studies and architecture tradeoff analysis among various imaging modality; foundational optical modelling with either Fraunhofer/Poisson/Fresnel approximations.
Professional optics design & fabrication¶
Plastic molded microscope lens for 96-well parallel microscope¶
Originally conceived by Dr Changhuei Yang and his PhD student, we spec’ed out the optical magnification, field of view, and focal shift requirements from the 96-CMOS camera project. When I took over the project, I reviewed the manufacturer provided CodeV raytracing report, provided expert’s feedback, and then validated the lens and the specifications with the Caltech-patented aberration extraction algorithm to analyze the Zernike coefficients.
A.C.S. Chan, J Kim, A Pan, H Xu, D Nojima, C Hale, S Wang, C Yang, “Parallel Fourier ptychographic microscopy for high-throughput screening with 96 cameras (96 Eyes)” Scientific Reports 9, 11114 (2019).
Patent: US10754140B2
All-optical spatial light modulator for structured illumination at 10 million FPS¶
The holy grail of a spatial light modulator (SLM) is to bypass all mechanical actuators in pursue of speed. At >10 million FPS range, the MEMS technology can no longer meet the requirements. I designed, modelled, and validated the all-optical SLM design on a physical optical setup.
Due to the cost prohibitive manufacturing and cleaning process of the thin-glass optical cavity (VIPA), I coded an optical simulator based on wave propagation optics, and optimized the SLM design parameter (e.g. thickness, reflectance, core material) based on multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA). The optimized design is successfully fabricated, assembled, and validated on a physical system.
Acousto-optic beam deflection at 1 million sweeps per second for pixel super-resolution¶
Under the lead of Dr Terence Wong, I procured the acousto-optic deflector (AOD) evaluation kit and integrated it into his ultrafast imaging flow cytometry system for cancer detection. I brought up the RF wave generator & amplifier module, and designed controller PCBs to synchronize incoming fempto-second laser pulses. I also conducted AOD sweep angle and step size trade studies to further understand the limit of the system.
Amateur optics¶
Poorman’s pinhole camera with silver-halide films¶
TBD.
2017 - 2010: Amateur telescope making¶
Phase 1: Coarse grinding
Phase 2: Fine grinding
Phase 3: Wet polishing with lap pitch
Phase 4: testing for optical aberration
Phase 5: Opto-mechanical assembly
Phase 6: field testing