FEATURE MICRO-OPTICS
know why. In Germany we have some institutes that offer this course of training in small optics, micro-optics and all the benefits, but this is not the standard. The standard is technical optics in general, that means all the equations that the physicists developed more than 300 years ago.’ Looking ahead, Hauschild believes that,
The Quantum X two-photon grayscale lithography system from Nanoscribe won an Innovation Award at Laser World of Photonics in June
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form of energy,’ Hauschild said, ‘so, if you can control the light, you can control all the processes and you can bring the light with light speed to the application. If you have the right beam shape, finally, the application will run much better than without beam shaping.’ At Laser World of Photonics, the company introduced new micro-optics for the production of flexible OLED displays. The sGauss beam profile features steeper edges, improving the throughput of UV lasers used in OLED manufacturing. ‘We changed the beam profile into new geometry,’ explained Hauschild, ‘and with the same laser power we increased the productivity up to 30 per cent.’ The optical design was enhanced far enough that the Gaussian profiles can be turned into a line with a length of up to 1,000mm and a width of 30µm. The steeper edges allow the laser energy to be used more effectively to separate the display film, and laser lift-off (LLO) process productivity can be increased by more than 30 per cent. The micro-optics for the sGauss profile are modular and feature a continuously adjustable line length and width. Existing systems can also be retrofitted with a sGauss module, allowing manufacturers to either directly boost productivity or, where less laser energy is used with the same systems, significantly extending the service life of their lasers. This new technology will also unlock other applications for UV solid-state lasers, such as annealing and crystallisation. Hauschild said: ‘After the [Laser Munich]
show, some of the display makers came to us and gave us samples, and for some special materials we increased the productivity by 80 per cent. This was surprising. If you optimise the material and processing beam shape, we can bring the
24 Electro Optics August/September 2019
laser material processing to a much higher level of process efficiency than with a non- optimised beam profile.’ Micro-optics are not without their
challenges, and for Hauschild ‘one of the biggest challenges, every day, is to deliver the highest quality for the lowest price’. He said: ‘We must also convince our customers that optical glass elements have a value that gives them the possibility of a very safe operation for many years. Finding the sweet spot of performance and price is challenging. If you scale the highest quality to large quantities at the end, you have to reduce the quality to optimise the cost and the price structure. It’s about finding the right ratio of price and performance.’
Speaking from experience The other challenge, he said, is the level of knowledge and experience in micro-optics. ‘Some of the companies that want to buy the optics, even today do not have enough experience in how to make use of all the advantages of the micro-optics’ functionality in the market. It means we often get enquiries asking us to produce a compact optical device, but they have no idea how to design the small optical system. There are only a few specialist companies in the world that have experience in how to design compact optical systems in a way that you get a good price performance ratio. ‘The major difference between micro- optics and optics, is that in micro- optics you have not only one or two curved surfaces, but a variety of optical and mechanical surfaces for easier integration into optical devices. That’s more complicated, in terms of design and assembling, but it simplifies the optical set- up, and micro-optics is still not something that you can study at university. I don’t
while there may not be many opportunities to make improvements in the technology, new applications for its use will continue to present themselves. ‘Moulding is also a technology to replicate a master structure using liquid glass, so this also opens the field of free-form optics. This means you can make one sophisticated tool with a crazy shape, and then you replicate it into glass just by pressing this master structure into the liquid glass, so that it’s heated up to 600-700 degrees. This has good possibilities for use in free-form shapes with multi-functional surfaces, but it is limited, in terms of applications with high added value.’ At the higher end of pricing, Hauschild
said there are unlimited uses, with small and medium quantities up to tens of thousands of pieces. ‘Applications with polymer lenses seem almost unlimited,’ he said. ‘It’s a question of how open you are to
“Micro-optics is still not something that you can study at university. I don’t know why”
designing new optical systems. Augmented and virtual reality glass are still at the beginning, the question is how to come to the right price level or the right features that people really want. Maybe Microsoft HoloLens and Google activities, with a lot of micro-optic components are a good example, but people are not open to pay $1,000 for such a gadget.’ Hauschild believes the era of highly
integrated micro-optics will come. ‘So many industries use optics in a more traditional way, and adding the features of micro- optics, beam shaping and shaping pictures – making something more compact and lightweight and combining functions in one optical element – it’s a never-ending story. This is because we are, every year, still at the beginning. ‘There are so many applications coming.
We have made a lot of steps forward but in many applications, the cost structure from high-end to low-cost consumer applications, for example, will open a lot of new possibilities. In industrial production, for example, people are starting to use micro-optics in a smarter and more efficient way.’ EO
@electrooptics |
www.electrooptics.com
Nanoscribe
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