GDOESII: Software for design of diffractive optical elements and phase mask conversion to GDSII lithography files

We develop an open source software “GDoeSII” for the simulation of Fresnel (near field) and Fraunhofer (far field) diffraction integrals of diffractive optical elements (DOE). It can compute the intensity distributions at a desired plane from the DOE. This software can also convert the phase profiles of the DOEs from standard image formats such as JPG and PNG to lithography graphic format GDSII for fabrication purposes. The conversion algorithm used in this program groups adjacent same-valued pixels and creates a single cell rather than creating a cell for each and every pixel in the image file. This results in a faster and smaller output GDSII file size. Conversion to the multi-layer GDSII format is also possible for grayscale lithography. We show, as an example, the simulation, GDSII conversion, fabrication and experimental results for the case of an Airy beam generator. GDoeSII offers a complete platform for researchers working in diffractive optics from simulations to lithography file preparation.