Large-Area Fabrication-Aware Computational Diffractive Optics

Kaixuan Wei1, Hector A. Jimenez-Romero1, Hadi Amata1, Jipeng Sun2, Qiang Fu1, Felix Heide2, Wolfgang Heidrich1
1KAUST     2Princeton University
ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia), 2025
Paper Supplementary Code arXiv

TL;DR:The design to manufacturing gap and the inability to optimize large-area devices significantly limit the adoption of learned diffractive optical systems. We introduce an end-to-end, fabrication-aware, distributed optimization framework closing these gaps.

Abstract

Differentiable optics, as an emerging paradigm that jointly optimizes optics and (optional) image processing algorithms, has made innovative optical designs possible across a broad range of applications. Many of these systems utilize diffractive optical components (DOEs) for holography, PSF engineering, or wavefront shaping. Existing approaches have, however, mostly remained limited to laboratory prototypes, owing to a large quality gap between simulation and manufactured devices. We aim at lifting the fundamental technical barriers to the practical use of learned diffractive optical systems. To this end, we propose a fabrication-aware design pipeline for diffractive optics fabricated by direct-write grayscale lithography followed by nano-imprinting replication, which is directly suited for inexpensive mass production of large area designs. We propose a super-resolved neural lithography model that can accurately predict the 3D geometry generated by the fabrication process. This model can be seamlessly integrated into existing differentiable optics frameworks, enabling fabrication-aware, end-to-end optimization of computational optical systems. To tackle the computational challenges, we also devise tensor-parallel compute framework centered on distributing large-scale FFT computation across many GPUs. As such, we demonstrate large scale diffractive optics designs up to 32.16 mm × 21.44 mm, simulated on grids of up to 128,640 by 85,760 feature points. We find adequate agreement between simulation and fabricated prototypes for applications such as holography and PSF engineering. We also achieve high image quality from an imaging system comprised only of a single DOE, with images processed only by a Wiener filter utilizing the simulation PSF. We believe our findings lift the fabrication limitations for real-world applications of diffractive optics and differentiable optical design.

Physical Origins of Design-to-Manufacturing Gap

Step-by-Step Illustration of the Fabrication Pipeline, the direct-write grayscale lithography followed by nano-imprinting replication, a process employed today for mass production of large-area devices. Due to the sophisticated photolithography process, 3-D optical proximity effects as well as the complex photochemical interaction render significant deviations from design to manufacturing.

Fabrication-Aware End-to-End Design of Diffractive Optical Systems

Fabrication-Aware Image Formation Model. Unlike most existing works that largely ignore the manufacturing process and assume the designed DOE can be fabricated as it is, We model the sophisticated fabrication process, the significant deviations from design to manufacturing with a neural lithography model, enabling joint optical design and fabrication correction end-to-end.

Distributed Computing Framework for Large-scale Wave Optics Simulation

Generalized Single Program Multiple Data (GSPMD)-based Distributed Computing Framework tailored for large-area fabrication-aware diffractive optics. We illustrate the distributed computation of the proposed distributed-memory FFT (top-left) and the spatial-partitioning convolution (bottom-left) leveraging tensor parallelism. The (GPU) processors can be arranged into a multi-dimensional mesh to enable arbitrary combinations of hybrid data and tensor parallelism. The tensor-parallel compute framework allows us to design large-area DOE at an unprecedented scale, breaking the memory bottleneck of existing differentiable optics frameworks.

Results in Computational Holographic Display

Experimental and Synthetic Assessments of Proposed Fabrication-Aware Method. Both the conventional and the fabrication-aware designs yield high-quality holograms in simulation. However, the experimental hologram produced by the conventional designs suffers from severe speckle artifacts, while the fabricated DOE designed through our approach generates almost speckle-free, high-resolution coherent hologram close to the simulation, without any additional optical filtering.
Simulation
Experimental

Conventional Design

Simulation
Experimental

Fabrication-Aware Design

Results in Single-DOE Broadband Color Imaging

Experimental Validation of Fabrication-aware Broadband DOE for Imaging. We capture diverse indoor and outdoor scenes with both conventional DOE and proposed fabrication-aware DOE. We conduct a Wiener filtering using simulated PSF on the experimental captured scenes. Our proposed fabrication-aware design yields high-fidelity results, while the conventional design results in images with severe chromatic aberration, ringing artifacts, and elevated noise.

Real-life Experimental Demonstrations

Experimental demonstrations of the diffractive optical elements (DOE) designed by our proposed fabrication-aware optimization framework for applications in computational holographic display and single-DOE broadband imaging.

BibTeX

        @article{Wei2025LAFA,
          author    = {Kaixuan Wei and Hector A. Jimenez-Romero and Hadi Amata and Jipeng Sun and Qiang Fu and Felix Heide and Wolfgang Heidrich},
          title     = {Large-Area Fabrication-aware Computational Diffractive Optics},
          journal   = {ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG)},
          year      = {2025},
          volume    = {44},
          number    = {6},
          articleno = {243},
          month     = {dec},
          doi       = {10.1145/3763358},
          publisher = {ACM}
        }