Design of diffractive optical elements with optimization of the signal-to-noise ratio and without a dummy area

We describe a new approach to suppress undesired diffraction orders in the signal area of a Fourier plane diffractive optical element (DOE). We implement this new approach for the DOE design by a two-stage iterative Fourier transform algorithm that incorporates an adaptive optimization of the signal-to-noise ratio and does not require the introduction of a dummy output area outside the field of view. A comparison among this approach and three other approaches are presented on the basis of numerical results from several sample diffraction patterns. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.