Burch, Jordan2016-12-192016-12-192016-08https://hdl.handle.net/11299/183391University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2016. Major: Electrical Engineering. Advisor: James Leger. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 107 pages.The resolution diffraction limit of an imaging system is inversely proportional to the width of its aperture. The depth of these systems, however, is determined by the choice of architecture. To show that an imaging system can be confined to a plane or a line, while maintaining high far-field resolution, two new architectures are presented. The planar device, referred to as an imaging skin, uses a grating coupler to map points in the far-field to guided modes in a slab waveguide. Similarly, an imaging thread is a nearly one-dimensional device which uses a tilted fiber Bragg grating to couple points into a guided mode of an optical fiber. The diffraction gratings introduce a high degree of chromatic aberration. To maintain their resolution, imaging skins and threads must use a narrow spectral filter. When these devices are used at finite conjugates, only sources very near the object plane have high coupling efficiency. Both systems, despite their extreme form factors, are shown to have far-field resolution near the diffraction limit of a lens with a similar diameter.enGrating couplerImagingTilted fiber bragg gratingThesis or Dissertation