From Lab to Fab — High‐Precision 3D Printing

Abstract

The demand of sophisticated components is continuously increasing, driven by big data, IoT, and Industry 4.0. Reducing process cost is impacting all levels in a vast majority of products. 3D printing is typically restricted to additive fabrication within one material class, structures are limited in size, shape, surface finish, requiring supporting structures. This prevents high quality photonic components. High precision 3D printing is utilizing a multiphoton process which is a powerful tool for prototyping of miniaturized designs in automated, scalable processes for products in photonic or medical packaging. While most of the 3D systems are still working rather on a lab than on an industrial scale with typically very long fabrication times ranging from minutes to hours for a single microlens, the process can be boosted significantly to a fabrication time in the range of seconds per lens using different fabrication strategies, resulting in microlenses with high optical quality. This saves more than 90 % of the fabrication time compared to standard fabrication, and 1 cm 2 lens arrays with high filling factors can be fabricated within only a few hours — a big step towards high throughput and industrial scalability.