Realization and performance evaluation of high speed autofocusing for direct laser lithography

The autofocusing is one of the important parts in the automated vision inspection or measurement using optical microscopes. Moreover, laser micromachining or laser lithography requires a high speed and precision autofocusing. In this paper, we propose and realize an autofocusing system using two cylindrical lenses, which is the enhanced version of the previous astigmatism method. It shows very good performances, especially very high speed and the largest range in comparison with the previous astigmatic methods. The performance of our autofocusing system was evaluated by tracing the linear stage whose position was monitored by a commercial laser interferometer. Then we applied the autofocusing to the direct laser lithographic system, and successfully fabricated circular symmetry patterns on a 300 mm diameter surface with the resolution of less than 1 microm within the defocusing range of +/-50 microm. The speed of the autofocusing was 150 Hz.