Elastomeric inverse moulding and vacuum casting process characterization for the fabrication of arrays of concave refractive microlenses

We present a complete and precise quantitative characterization of the different process steps used in an elastomeric inverse moulding and vacuum casting technique. We use the latter replication technique to fabricate concave replicas from an array of convex thermal reflow microlenses. During the inverse elastomeric moulding we obtain a secondary silicone mould of the original silicone mould in which the master component is embedded. Using vacuum casting, we are then able to cast out of the second mould several optical transparent poly-urethane arrays of concave refractive microlenses. We select ten particular representative microlenses on the original, the silicone moulds and replica sample and quantitatively characterize and statistically compare them during the various fabrication steps. For this purpose, we use several state-of-the-art and ultra-precise characterization tools such as a stereo microscope, a stylus surface profilometer, a non-contact optical profilometer, a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, a Twyman-Green interferometer and an atomic force microscope to compare various microlens parameters such as the lens height, the diameter, the paraxial focal length, the radius of curvature, the Strehl ratio, the peak-to-valley and the root-mean-square wave aberrations and the surface roughness. When appropriate, the microlens parameter under test is measured with several different measuring tools to check for consistency in the measurement data. Although none of the lens samples shows diffraction-limited performance, we prove that the obtained replicated arrays of concave microlenses exhibit sufficiently low surface roughness and sufficiently high lens quality for various imaging applications.