In natural world, plane retina, on which are based our cameras does not exist. The focal plane is either concave for human beings or convex in insects' eyes. Both curvatures offer novel solution to miniaturize and simplify the optical design, and both of them have been studied in this work.The concave curving of the focal plane suppresses one aberration, the field curvature, on which depends the image quality of large field of view instruments. Advantages in image quality and optical design have been studied by theoretical analysis and by real cases of instruments. The convex curvature results in a miniaturization achieved by reproducing the compound eye of small invertebrates. This design, which is composed of several groups of pixels interconnected by metallic lines, has been realized with cooled infrared detecting device. The performed detectors are still electrically functional with a comparable behaviour than conventional sensors. The originality of this work is the spherical curvature of monocrystalline and monolithic components; the active layer is not modified for this purpose. The process of curvature has been developed on thinned square silicon bare dies and then transferred to thinned functional devices: Si-CMOS and micro-bolometers. The concave curvature of bolometers leads to the realization of two cameras. The first one, composed of two commercial lenses, was dedicated to the comparison between a planar traditional camera and a curved detector system. Optical advantages, and especially the response uniformity, have been proved thanks to measures of the contrast modulation function (CMF). Finally, I have realized an infrared eye composed of a unique lens and a curved concave bolometer. Both the image quality obtained and CMF experiments proved the interest of the curved focal plane in miniaturized optical systems.
