Molding Aspheric Lenses for Low-Cost Production Versus Diamond Turned Lenses

As lens design using aspheric diffractive lenses has become more popular in designing faster, low F/# infrared (IR) optical systems; the increased quantities manufactured of these glass lenses is following suit. Historically, Single Point Diamond Turning (SPDT) has been the method of choice in producing high quality glass aspheric and diffractive lenses, but with the volume of lenses produced and technological advances in Precision Molded Optics (PMO), it is now becoming highly cost efficient to use molding as a means of producing these glass optic lenses. This paper will discuss lens shapes, tolerances, present and future optic lens sizes that are being done using PMO as well as present an experiment conducted comparing the surface quality of a chalcogenide lens manufactured with SPDT and PMO.