Patent ID: 7262917
Filing Date: 2007-08-28
Classification: G02B,G03F

Abstract:
1. A method for fabricating out-of-plane microoptical devices, said method comprising the steps of: (a) coating a layer of a negative photoresist onto a planar support substrate; (b) selectively irradiating said photoresist through a mask with two or more intersecting radiation beams impinging at different angles to create one or more latent first microoptical structures in the photoresist layer, wherein at least some of the first microoptical structures have optical axes that lie in a plane parallel to the plane of the substrate; (c) selectively irradiating the photoresist with two or more intersecting beams of radiation impinging at different angles to create one or more latent second microoptical structures, wherein the second microoptical structures comprise one or more fully-exposed regions in areas exposed by two or more beams and one or more partially-exposed regions in areas exposed by only one beam, and one or more unexposed regions in areas exposed by no radiation, wherein at least some of the second microoptical structures have optical axes that lie in the same plane as the plane of the optical axes of the first microoptical structures, and wherein at least some of the first and second microoptical structures have the same optical axis; (d) curing the latent first and second structures in the photoresist; and (e) developing the photoresist, so that unexposed regions of the photoresist are completely removed, so that fully-exposed regions of the photoresist remain, and so that partially-exposed regions of the photoresist are partly removed, wherein the resulting surface at junctures between two partially-exposed regions and at junctures between partially-exposed regions and fully-exposed regions is smoother than it would have been had the partially-exposed regions of the photoresist completely remained.