Optical lens design

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Optical lens design" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Optical lens design is the process of designing a lens to meet a set of performance requirements and constraints, including cost and manufacturing limitations. Parameters include surface profile types (spherical, aspheric, holographic, diffractive, etc.), as well as radius of curvature, distance to the next surface, material type and optionally tilt and decenter. The process is computationally intensive, using ray tracing or other techniques to model how the lens affects light that passes through it.