No abstract

Near infrared (NIR) activable photopolymers suitable for versatile fabrication of microoptical elements were developed. The first main objective of this paper is to show that these new photopolymers can be used for microfabrication and investigate the parameters governing the microfabrication process. The impact of photonic, physico-chemical and chemical parameters is discussed. High quality microstructures with a good control over their size and shape are demonstrated. The second main objective is to show practical examples of microlenses and waveguides implemented on single core and multiple core optical fibers, VCSELs, and glass slides are then presented. The NIR photosensitivity of this negative tone photoresists allows using the device source itself as to start the crosslinking process, which constitutes a convenient approach for micro-optics self-positioning on NIR sources and justifies the interest of such NIR photopolymer for the fabrication micro-optical elements and optical interconnects.

International audienceWe demonstrate the output beam collimation of GaAs-based vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers by means of self-aligned polymer microlenses deposited on SU-8 pedestals using a cantilever-based spotter. We show that this fabrication technique ensures a reproducible lens shape because the contact angle and the deposited volume are constant for a given surface. Device properties are presented and compared to optical beam propagation modeling results. We demonstrate that the final beam divergence is only controlled by pedestal design parameters and can be reduced with this method by a factor 10 (to 1.2° for single-mode devices) with no significant lasing performance modification