Development of planar optics for an optical tracking sensor

An optical tracking sensor for large-capacity flexible disk drive (FDD) is demonstrated. The passive optics is compact and lightweight (5.4 mm length×3.6 mm width×1.2 mm height in size and 18 mg weight). It comprises all passive optical elements necessary for optical tracking, e.g., a focusing lens, a three-beam grating, an aperture and a beam splitter grating. Three beams were focused to a predetermined spot size of 13 μm at designed intervals of 110 μm on a disk surface and the reflected beams were successfully guided to photodiodes. This confirms that the application of the planar optical technique is very useful for realizing a compact and light optical sensor.