Complex illumination system for fast interferometric measurements

Freeform metrology is an enabling technology for today’s research and advanced manufacturing. The Tilted Wave Interferometer is a full field measurement system for fast and flexible measurements. It is based on an off-axis illumination scheme based on a microlens array. In this contribution, we present a novel illumination system for the tilted wave interferometer, that allows to reduce the measurement time by a factor of four using parallelization based on wavelength multiplexing. Here we present a design solution that utilizes the flexibility of 3D-printing. The microlenses are realized as multi-order diffractive optical elements, providing a high efficiency compared to colorfilter based realizations. To boost the light efficiency of the novel illumination system further, a field lens functionality is added to the system by adding individual micro-prisms to each microlens. The system is manufactured by the use of grayscale two-photon polymerisation.