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When a new technology is integrated into industry commodity products and consumer electronic
devices, and sold worldwide in retail stores, it is usually understood that this technology has then
entered the realm of mainstream technology and therefore mainstream industry.
Such a leap however does not come cheap, as it has a double edge sword effect: first it becomes
democratized and thus massively developed by numerous companies for various applications, but
also it becomes a commodity, and thus gets under tremendous pressure to cut down its production
and integration costs while not sacrificing to performance.
We will show, based on numerous examples extracted from recent industry history, that the field
of Diffractive Optics is about to undergo such a major transformation. Such a move has many
impacts on all facets of digital diffractive optics technology, from the optical design houses to the
micro-optics foundries (for both mastering and volume replication), to the final product
integrators or contract manufacturers.
The main causes of such a transformation are, as they have been for many other technologies in
industry, successive technological bubbles which have carried and lifted up diffractive optics
technology within the last decades. These various technological bubbles have been triggered
either by real industry needs or by virtual investment hype. Both of these causes will be discussed
in the paper.
The adjective ""digital"" in "digital diffractive optics" does not refer only, as it is done in digital
electronics, to the digital functionality of the element (digital signal processing), but rather to the
digital way they are designed (by a digital computer) and fabricated (as wafer level optics using
digital masking techniques). However, we can still trace a very strong similarity between the
emergence of micro-electronics from analog electronics half a century ago, and the emergence of
digital optics from conventional optics today.
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