A compact optical pickup head in blue wavelength with high horizontal stability for laser thermal lithography

A compact optical pickup head in blue wavelength with a single-axial actuator i.e. focusing, for laser thermal lithography was designed, fabricated, and tested. The numerical aperture of the objective lens was 0.85. The linear range of the focus error signal was 3 μm. A planar spring structure for improving the horizontal stability was designed and incorporated into the actuator. We applied a modified push-pull method together with a static Blu-ray re-writable disc to test the horizontal stability of the pickup head. We found that the in-plane jitter of the pickup head in two orthogonal directions were 0.34 nm and 1.59 nm, respectively. We demonstrated an example of applying the pickup head to write an inorganic photo-resist GeSbSnO film, and well-defined pattern was obtained with ~220 nm spot size.