Thin optical zoom camera made of deformable mirrors in reflective configuration

The thickness of the smart phones in today’s market is usually below than 10 mm, and with the shrinking of the phone volume, the difficulty of its production of the camera lens has been increasing. Therefore, how to give the imaging device more functionality in the smaller space is one of the interesting research topics for today’s mobile phone companies. In this paper, we proposed a thin optical zoom system which is combined of micro-electromechanical components and reflective optical architecture. By the adopting of the MEMS deformable mirrors, we can change their radius of curvature to reach the optical zoom in and zoom out. Furthermore, because we used the all-reflective architecture, so the system has eliminated the considerable chromatic aberrations in the absence of lenses.
Generally speaking, due to the adopting of low power consumption actuated system (MEMS deformable mirror) and the multi-folded light path, we believed this system has the potential to be applied in the mobile phone camera in the future.