Shrinkage-Considered Mold Design for Improvement of Micro/Nano-Structured Optical Element Performance

Polymer shrinkage in nano-imprint lithography (NIL) is one of the critical issues that must be considered in order to produce a quality product. Especially, this condition should be considered during the manufacture of optical elements, because micro/nano-structured optical elements should be controlled to fit the desired shape in order to achieve the intended optical performance. In this paper, during NIL, we characterized the shrinkage of polymeric resin on micro lens array (MLA), which is one of the representative micro/nano-structured optical elements. The curvature shape and optical performance of MLA were measured to check the shrinkage tendency during the process. The master mold of MLA was generated by the two-photon polymerization (2PP) additive manufacturing method, and the tested samples were replicated from the master mold with NIL. Several types of resin were adjusted to prepare the specimens, and the shrinkage effects in each case were compared. The shrinkage showed different trends based on the NIL materials and MLA shapes. These characterizations can be applied to compensate for the MLA design, and the desired performance of MLA products can be achieved with a corrected master mold.