This PDF file contains the front matter associated with SPIE Proceedings Volume 9189 including the Title Page, Copyright information, Table of Contents, Introduction, and the Conference Committee listing.

Scientific and technical innovations take place in many laboratories. There can be a lot of ground to cover from an innovative concept to an industrial product commercialized by a company. Different processes have been implemented in France to develop a real ecosystem to facilitate this process. Photonics clusters, incubators, start-up nurseries and technology transfer structures are working together with funding structures like business angels and with some public support. To illustrate the process, an example of a photonics concept applied to develop accurate and selective gas sensors will also be presented along with the approach used.

Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) and quantitative image analysis (QIA) methods (i.e., computerized methods of analyzing digital breast images: mammograms, ultrasound, and magnetic resonance images) can yield novel image-based tumor and parenchyma characteristics (i.e., signatures that may ultimately contribute to the design of patient-specific breast cancer management plans). The role of QIA/CAD has been expanding beyond screening programs towards applications in risk assessment, diagnosis, prognosis, and response to therapy as well as in data mining to discover relationships of image-based lesion characteristics with genomics and other phenotypes; thus, as they apply to disease states. These various computer-based applications are demonstrated through research examples from the Giger Lab.

Crystalline silicon carbide is a wide bandgap semiconductor material with excellent optical properties, chemical inertness, radiation hardness and high mechanical strength at high temperatures. It is an excellent material platform for sensor applications in harsh environments such as combustion systems and nuclear reactors. A laser doping technique is used to fabricate SiC sensors for different combustion gases such as CO₂, CO, NO and NO₂. The sensor operates based on the principle of semiconductor optics, producing optical signal in contrast to conventional electrical sensors that produces electrical signal. The sensor response is measured with a low power He-Ne or diode laser.

Since the invention of the CCD detector in 1969 by George Smith and Willard Boyle, incremental innovations to the dispersive imaging spectrograph have slowly materialized in response the abounding advances in CCD detector technology. The modern Czerny-Turner type spectrograph, arguably the most commonly used instrument in optical spectroscopy, fails to uphold the ever increasing needs today's researchers demand, let alone tomorrow's. This paper discusses an innovative solution to the Czerny-Turner imaging spectrograph bridging a more than 20 year gap in development and understanding. A manifold of techniques in optical spectroscopy both advantaged and enabled by this innovation are expounded upon.

Moore’s Law, the idea that every two years or so chips double in complexity and the cost of a transistor is always in decline, has been the foundation of the semiconductor industry for nearly 50 years. The main technical force behind Moore’s Law has been lithography scaling: shrinking of lithographic features at a rate faster than the increase in finished wafer costs. With smaller feature size comes the need for better control of those sizes during manufacturing. Critical dimension and overlay control must scale in proportion to feature size, and has done so for the last 50 years. But in the sub-50-nm feature size regime, a new problem has arisen: line-edge roughness due to the stochastic nature of the lithography process. Despite significant effort, this line-edge roughness has not scaled in proportion to feature size and is thus consuming an ever larger fraction of the feature size control budget. Projection of current trends predicts a collision course between lithography scaling needs and line-edge roughness reality. In the end, stochastic uncertainty in lithography and its manifestation as line-edge roughness will prove the ultimate limiter of resolution in semiconductor manufacturing.

Increasing costs of wafer processing, particularly for lithographic processes, have made it increasingly difficult to achieve simultaneous reductions in cost-per-function and area per device. Multiple patterning techniques have made possible the fabrication of circuit layouts below the resolution limit of single optical exposures but have led to significant increases in the costs of patterning. Innovative techniques, such as self-aligned double patterning (SADP) have enabled good device performance when using less expensive patterning equipment. Other innovations have directly reduced the cost of manufacturing. A number of technical challenges must be overcome to enable a return to single-exposure patterning using short wavelength optical techniques, such as EUV patterning.

The Space Optics Laboratory at Yonsei University, Korea, in cooperation with Breault Research Organization (BRO) in Tucson, Arizona, have invested significant research and development efforts into creating large scale ray tracing techniques for simulating “reflected” light from the earth with an artificial satellite. This presentation describes a complex model that combines the sun, the earth and an orbiting optical instrument combined into a real scale nonsequential ray tracing computation using BRO’s Advanced Systems Analysis Program, ASAP®. The Sun is simulated as a spherically emitting light source of 695,500 km in diameter. The earth also is simulated as a sphere with its characteristics defined as target objects to be observed and defined with appropriate optical properties. They include the atmosphere, land and ocean elements, each having distinctive optical properties expressed by single or combined characteristics of refraction, reflection and scattering. The current embodiment has an atmospheric model consisting of 33 optical layers, a land model with 6 different albedos and the ocean simulated with sun glint characteristics. A space-based optical instrument, with an actual opto-mechanical prescription, is defined in an orbit of several hundreds to thousands of miles in altitude above the earth’s surface. The model allows for almost simultaneous evaluations of the imaging and radiometric performances of the instrument. Several real-life application results are reported suggesting that this simulation approach not only provides valuable information that can greatly improve the space optical instrument performance but also provides a simulation tool for scientists to evaluate all phases of a space mission.