fhapgood@world.std.com (Fred Hapgood) (07/26/90)
At the August 7 meeting of the Nanotechnology Study Group (NE43-774; 7:45pm) Wilfrid Veldcamp of MIT's Lincoln lab will summarize research in and prospective applications of a light-handling technology known as binary optics. Binary optics refers to lenses that work by diffraction instead of refraction. (The term 'binary' derives from the lens fabrication process.) The technology is expected to lead to significant enhancements and efficiencies in conventional optical elements such as lens implants, lasers, and 3-D glasses. Perhaps the most intriguing possibility is machine vision. High quality machine vision is likely to require some equivalent to a retina: an artificial organ that subjects the photon input of a receptor to massively parallel processing at the site of that input. Most of the potential applications of machine vision, for example in industry, are expected to run at fairly high speeds. Electronic materials appear to be too slow to execute the enormous number of computations required in the time available. An alternative would be to process the photons optically. Dr. Veldcamp calls this application of optical computing 'amacronics', after the class of retinal neurons associated with low level feature and motion detection. Photon processing requires lenses, and refractive lenses have mimimum sizes that are inconveniently high, given the envisioned applications of machine vision. The true microlens is likely to be a diffractive lens.