Study of Tolerance Analysis for Mobile Phone Lenses

Abstract

Mobile phone lenses have a compact structure with many aspheric surfaces. The lenses have four to six elements with a total track length of less than 10 millimeter. The field of view for ordinary mobile phone lenses is approximately 40 degrees. The f-number is smaller than 3. The distortion is less than 3% for the entire field of view.Lens designers can model these miniature lenses by utilizing optical design software. The software can simulate the ideal structure to meet the design specifications. However, the manufacturing process could affect the system performance due to several parameters. In this thesis, nine mobile phone lenses will go through tolerance analysis using different methods: RMS wavefront error analysis in ZEMAX, Image simulation in ZEMAX, and Production yield analysis in CodeV. These nine lenses have different numbers of elements, which are 3-piece, 4-piece, and 5-piece lens assemblies. All the lenses have a similar field of view and f-number. The criterion is the RMS wavefront error of less than 0.5 waves. Only the assembling error is considered in these analyses. Each method provides pros and cons. The results will be presented and discussed in detail.