Multifunctional materials for lean processing of waferscale optics

The continuous miniaturization of components and devices along with the increasing need of sustainability in production requires materials which can fulfill the manifold requests concerning their functionality. From an industrial point of view emphasis is on cost reduction either for the materials, the processes, or for both, along with a facilitation of processing and a general reduction of resource consumption in manufacturing. Multifunctional nanoscale materials have been widely investigated due to their tunable material properties and their ability to fulfill the increasingly growing demands in miniaturization, ease of processes, low-cost manufacturing, scalability, reliability, and finally sustainability. A material class which fulfills these requirements and is suited for integrated or waferscale optics are inorganic-organic hybrid polymers such as ORMOCER®s [ORMOCER® is registered by the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft für Angewandte Forschung e.V. and commercialized by microresist technology GmbH under license since 2003]. The combination of chemically designed multifunctional low-cost materials with tunable optical properties is very attractive for (integrated) optical and waferscale applications via a variety of different nano- and microstructuring techniques to fabricate micro- and nano-optical components, typically within less than a handful of process steps. The influence of photoinitiator and cross-linking conditions onto the optical properties of an acrylate-based inorganic-organic hybrid polymer will be discussed, and its suitability for being applied in waferscale optics is demonstrated and discussed for miniaturized multi- and single channel imaging optics.