Improved tolerancing for production yield anticipation of optical micro-modules for cameraphones

Tolerancing an optical design is vital when optical modules are produced in tens of millions. In these cases the production yield is all-important: it will decide if the product will be a success. While optical design softwares provide powerful tolerancing tools, to get an idea of what the production yield will be, we will have to go a step further. A way of taking this step consists in a tolcrancing procedure that will use these tolerancing tools and a dedicated analysis software: - A list of specifications that the lenses will have to fit into has to be established. - A merit function that will calculate each of these specs will have to be written. - For the tolerancing itself, a script will have to be used to write to an output file all these values for each lens created during tolerancing - The analysis software will read the output file, make all the desired statistics and then give the production yield and other relevant informations (e.g. yield and behavior of any spec)