Fabrication of polydimethylsiloxane microlens arrays by surface tension induced

liquid separation
Kyounggun Lee1, Yun-Ho Jang1, Joo-Young Jin1, Chang-Hyeon Ji2, Yong-Kweon Kim1
1
School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea
2
Department of Electronics Engineering, Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea
E-mail: yongkkim@snu.ac.kr

Published in Micro & Nano Letters; Received on 19th July 2011; Revised on 15th August 2011

This Letter presents a novel fabrication method to build polymer microlens arrays. The key mechanism of the fabrication process is surface
tension, which induces liquid separation phenomenon when a post is immersed and detached from a bottom liquid mixture. The surface tension
also acts on the formation of lens surface at liquid –air interface resulting in an excellent surface roughness. The surface profile of lenses is well
fitted with an ideal lens profile. The other feature of the presented fabrication method is self-positioning of the lens into the post. The range of
focal lengths was between 110.4 and 282.0 mm, which were determined by three parameters such as a post radius, gap and bottom liquid
thickness. In summary, the STILS method can be a powerful tool to create microlens arrays with a smooth surface and a high scalability
for the future applications in optoelectronics or microfluidics.

1. Introduction: Microlenses are indispensible optical elements

used in diverse systems, including optical interconnections [1],
adoptive optics [2 –4] and imaging systems for three-dimensional
displays [5, 6]. A lot of research has been carried out to address
the requirements of the microlenses or their arrays in those
systems, especially for high quality, low cost and mass productivity.
One typical technique is thermal reflow of photoresist patterns
on substrates [7–11]. This simple way fabricates a number of
microlenses in a single process at a time. However, low transpar-
ency and thermal instability of the photoresist can be drawbacks
for the reflow process to be used widely. An alternative way is dis-
pensing lens material directly on a target substrate [12]. This method
is easy to control focal length and to obtain smooth lens surface, but
a low throughput and less accurate alignment might restrict the wide
application of this method. Casting of microlens arrays from the
spherical masters that are fabricated by isotropic etching [13] or
laser shaping is the other approach to fabricate lenses in a high Figure 1 Process flow of the lens array fabrication by using STILS method
throughput manner, but bubbles during casting process and low a Silicon nitride (0.5 mm) was patterned with a standard photoresist
surface quality could degrade optical properties [14]. (AZ1512). The exposed silicon was etched with KOH solution to the
In this Letter, a simple fabrication process by using surface tension depth of 30 mm
induced liquid separation (STILS) is proposed for high throughput b SU-8 was spin-coated and patterned on the pre-etched silicon substrate
c PDMS prepolymer mixture was poured onto the master and cured for 6 h
fabrication without compromised surface properties. The STILS at 708C. Then the PDMS structure was peeled off from the master
procedure starts with dipping and withdrawing of cylindrical post d The fabricated structure was immersed into spin-coated PDMS
arrays in polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) prepolymer mixture to prepolymer mixture (liquid) on a glass wafer
create a liquid PDMS on the post array. The liquid PDMS forms a e Mild pressure was applied to ensure that all spacers contacted to the
lens shape automatically by surface tension. A final step is the bottom surface
thermal curing of PDMS to obtain a solid lens array. This approach f Transferred prepolymer mixture on the post formed a lens due to the
surface tension. Last the whole structures were cured to obtain solidified
has two advantages: a small surface roughness and self-aligning, lenses
both benefits come from the natural property of the surface tension.
The lens surface is defined by a surface tension at the interface
photoresist (AZ1512). Then we etched the silicon wafer (depth:
between liquid and air, which minimises the surface roughness.
30 mm) for 30 min (Fig. 1a). The etched depth defined the relative
The lens is autonomously positioned into the centre of the post
spacer height compared to post height. Next, SU-8 photoresist (thick-
without any complex alignment, which implies a possibility of
ness: 100 mm) was patterned on the pre-etched silicon wafer
large array fabrication with accurate alignment. In addition, the
(Fig. 1b). The post array has a cylindrical geometry so that further
focal lengths can be tuned by post radius and bottom liquid thickness.
lens shape can be easily achieved by surface tension. The PDMS
The fabrication method presented in this letter will play an important
post array was ready to use when we poured PDMS prepolymer
role in the integration of polymer lenses with optoelectronic devices
mixture onto the fabricated master and cured for 2 h at 708C
or microfluidic devices.
(Fig. 1c). We used PDMS as a post material, since it is transparent
between wavelengths of 230– 700 nm and the molding process is
2. Experiments and discussion: A cylindrical PDMS post array well established [15].
was molded from a silicon master by a soft lithography as described Then, the fabricated structure was used to form a lens array on the
in Figs. 1a– c. First, we deposited silicon nitride (thickness: 0.5 mm) bottom of posts by STILS. The structure was immersed into a prepo-
for an etch mask during potassium hydroxide (KOH) wet etch. The lymer mixture whose thickness was controlled by spin-coating
deposited silicon nitride was patterned with a standard positive (Fig. 1d). In this step, the spacer maintained a uniform gap

Micro & Nano Letters, 2011, Vol. 6, Iss. 9, pp. 809 –811 809
doi: 10.1049/mnl.2011.0377 & The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2011
between the structure and the bottom mixture, which increased the
uniformity of focal lengths and fabrication yield. We applied a
mild pressure to contact spacers on the mixture completely
(Fig. 1e). When we detached the PDMS structure from the bottom
mixture, the prepolymer remained on the post array and formed a
parabolic shape as long as we maintained the structure upside
down (Fig. 1f). The post arrays have radii of 50, 75 and 100 mm
with the constant height of 100 mm. The gap was designed to be
20, 100 and 200% of the post radius. However we could not
include the data from 20% gap structures, since PDMS posts were
easily stuck to each other due to the high viscosity of PDMS. The
thickness of prepolymer was measured as 36, 56 and 105 mm by con-
trolling the angular velocity during spin-coating of PDMS prepoly-
mer mixture on a glass wafer. Each chip has a size of
10 × 10 mm2 with 400 –900 lenses.
Fig. 2 shows the SEM images of SU-8 molds and PDMS struc-
tures. Figs. 2a and b show the different depths of master molds for
Figure 3 Optical image of the lens array (50 mm radius, 50 mm gap)
posts and spacers. The average heights of the posts and spacers were Light source was located under lenses and the transmitted light was focused
measured as 102.0 and 131.4 mm, respectively, so that the post at spots as shown
array is separated from the mixture bottom with about 30 mm.
The top surface of the post was molded from the polished surface
of a silicon wafer, which minimised the surface roughness as
shown in Fig. 2c. In our additional experiment (not shown here),
the surfaces formed by reactive ion etching or wet etching were
too rough to obtain smooth lens surfaces. After STILS process,
we could obtain uniform microlenses (Fig. 2d).
Fig. 3 shows the optical image of a microlens array with a radius
of 50 mm and a gap of 50 mm. UV beam was illuminated from the
bottom side and focused spots were observed as shown in the
Figure. The self-alignment of the lenses to the posts successfully
produced well-aligned lenses. The focal length of each lens was cal-
culated from surface profiles that were measured using a three-
dimensional surface profiler. We used the standard deviation
divided by the average to characterise the uniformity of the focal
length of the fabricated lenses. The value was only 6.1% inside a
4-inch substrate, which implies STILS can produce very uniform
focal lengths of lenses. Figure 4 Measured surface profiles and roughness of the fabricated lenses
Fig. 4 shows the measured surface profiles of three lenses. The Thickness of prepolymer mixture was 56 mm. Surface roughness was
data were extracted at the centreline of 70 mm long and overlapped measured by AFM inside an area of 5 × 5 mm2 on a centre region
together to show the different surface profiles at different lens radii.
The surface profiles were fitted with a parabolic equation (Origin that the lenses have superior lens profiles. The subset of Fig. 4
Pro 8, OriginLab, USA). All of the R-squared values between the also shows the topography image of fabricated lens surface. The
measured profiles and the fitted curves were over 0.95, indicating measured area was 5 × 5 mm2 from the centre of the lens.
Average (Ra) and root mean square (RMS) (RRMS) of surface rough-
ness were measured as 1.953 and 2.902 nm, respectively. Since the
surface roughness is less than 1% of wavelength at visible rays
(380–780 nm), the lens surface will not cause any distortion
because of the rough surface.
The focal length in terms of the post radius was visualised in
Fig. 5. We measured 20 lenses for each type. Radius of curvature
R of the fabricated lens was calculated from the measured surface
profiles based on (1)
r 2 + h2
R= (1)
2h

Figure 2 SEM images of SU-8 masters and formed lenses
a Master of a cylindrical post array (75 mm radius and 15 mm gap)
b Master of spacers
c Fabricated post array (50 mm radius and 100 mm gap)
d Formed lenses after STILS process (75 mm radius and 75 mm gap)
where r is a post radius and h is the sag of the lens. Then, we could
obtain the focal length ( f ¼ R/(n 2 1)) with a refractive index of
PDMS, n. The range of focal lengths (110.4–282.0 mm) was
obtained by different mixture thicknesses, a post radius and a post
gap, as shown in Fig. 5. A thicker prepolymer resulted in an
increased volume on the post, which decreased the focal length.
The post gap is affected in a similar way as the prepolymer thick-
ness. If the gap is increased two times (from 100 to 200%), the
post density will be decreased so that the prepolymer mixture can
provide more liquid to each post leading to a shorter focal length.
Using these parameters, we can design the focal length by selecting
prepolymer thickness, post radius and gap. Note the post radius is a

810 Micro & Nano Letters, 2011, Vol. 6, Iss. 9, pp. 809 –811
& The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2011 doi: 10.1049/mnl.2011.0377
Figure 5 Focal lengths with respect to a post radius, a prepolymer thickness and a post gap
a Gaps between microlenses are 100%
b 200% of each post radius
dominant factor to obtain a different focal length among three
parameters.
Here we demonstrated the STILS method to implement PDMS
lenses on PDMS post structures; however, the method can be
applied to any viscous materials on round structures. One promising
application is the integration of lenses with electro-optic devices
such as vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs) [16].
The lens implemented by STILS can be aligned autonomously to
the semiconductor lasers to improve the optical performance.
Another emerging application is microfluidic area where optical
measurements are performed to analyse the reactions or biological
experiments inside transparent micro devices [17 –19]. The tuning
range of the focal length is similar to the thickness of typical
microfluidic channels in lab-on-a-chip devices so that the inte-
gration STILS method with lab-on-a-chips can help optical focus-
ing or enhancement of the light collection.
3. Conclusion: We described a new fabrication method of lens
arrays using STILS. This approach made it possible to create tens
of thousands of lenses at the same time. The surface roughness
was smooth (,2 nm) and the lens profile was well fitted with a
parabolic curve. More importantly, the lenses were self-aligned
to the centre of posts, which will eliminate complicated and time-
consuming process to obtain exactly aligned lenses. The focal
lengths can be tuned by adjusting a prepolymer thickness, a post
radius and a post gap. Our STILS approach for lens array fabrication
may provide a promising way to create useful tools for the
applications such as compound photonic devices and integration
with lab-on-a-chip systems.
4. Acknowledgment: This work was supported by Korea Sanhak
foundation in 2010– 2011.
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