Silicon deformable mirrors and CMOS-based wavefront sensors

Inexpensive wavefront sensors and deformable mirrors are essential for addressing potential commercial applications for adaptive optics like laser beam control and ophthalmology. Silicon micromachined deformable mirrors offer the potential for low cost and high actuator density, but there are some problems with the architectures currently available like low mirror quality and high actuator crosstalk. Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors are still based on traditional charge coupled device (CCD) arrays making them very expensive at high frame rates. To address the need for low cost deformable mirrors, we have implemented a new architecture of silicon deformable mirror designed to be low cost, have low actuator crosstalk, and still maintain good mirror quality. Furthermore, we built and tested a CMOS Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor to address the needs of the adaptive optics community for high speed wavefront sensing.