Overview

The courses in this specialization can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5600-5602, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Enroll here. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. This course will teach you how to design such optical systems with simple graphical techniques, then transform those pencil and paper designs to include real optical components including lenses, diffraction gratings and prisms. You will learn how to enter these designs into an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax, to analyze and improve performance with powerful automatic optimization methods.

Syllabus

Course 1: First Order Optical System Design
Course 2: Optical Efficiency and Resolution
Course 3: Design of High-Performance Optical Systems

Courses

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22 hours 9 minutes
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This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5600, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. When you finish this course, you will be able to design, to first order, such optical systems with simple mathematical and graphical techniques. This first order design will allow you to develop the foundation needed to begin all optical design as well as the intuition needed to quickly address the feasibility of complicated designs during brainstorming meetings. You will learn how to enter these designs into an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax, to analyze and improve performance with powerful automatic optimization methods.
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21 hours 8 minutes
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This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5601, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. This course will teach you how to design such optical systems with simple mathematical and graphical techniques. The first order optical system design covered in the previous course is useful for the initial design of an optical imaging system but does not predict the energy and resolution of the system. This course discusses the propagation of intensity for Gaussian beams and incoherent sources. It also introduces the mathematical background required to design an optical system with the required field of view and resolution. You will also learn how to analyze these characteristics of your optical system using an industry-standard design tool, OpticStudio by Zemax.
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23 hours 15 minutes
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This course can also be taken for academic credit as ECEA 5602, part of CU Boulder’s Master of Science in Electrical Engineering degree. Optical instruments are how we see the world, from corrective eyewear to medical endoscopes to cell phone cameras to orbiting telescopes. This course extends what you have learned about first-order, paraxial system design and optical resolution and efficiency with the introduction to real lenses and their imperfections. We begin with a description of how different wavelengths propagate through systems, then move on to aberrations that appear with high angle, non-paraxial systems and how to correct for those problems. The course wraps up with a discussion of optical components beyond lenses and an excellent example of a high-performance optical system – the human eye. The mathematical tools required for analysis of high-performance systems are complicated enough that this course will rely more heavily on OpticStudio by Zemax. This will allow students to analyze systems that are too complicated for the simple analysis thus far introduced in this set of courses.