ARRAY ILLUMINATORS AND COMPLEXITY THEORY

The job of an array illuminator (AIL) is to distribute light signals to an array of optoelectronic elements on a chip. Many different AIL designs have been proposed. The so called DAMMANN-AIL is especially well suited to send arbitrarily shaped but identical light pattern to each element on the chip. A modified TALBOT-AIL has now the same flexibility. The scaling behavior of these two designs for growing array sizes with up to 1 000 x 1 000 elements is studied in the spirit of complexity theory. That theory will be introduced and recommended as a strategic tool for optical instrument design.