Manufacturability estimates for optical aspheres.

Some simple measures of the difficulty of a variety of steps in asphere fabrication are defined by reference to fundamental geometric considerations. It is shown that effective approximations can then be exploited when an asphere's shape is characterized by using a particular orthogonal basis. The efficiency of the results allows them to be used not only as quick manufacturability estimates at the production end, but more importantly as part of an efficient design process that can boost the resulting optical systems' cost-effectiveness.