Fabrication of Diffractive Optical Elements

In earlier chapters, the design and analysis of simple and multifunctional DOEs using different techniques are presented. In this chapter, pre-fabrication techniques such as designing the lithography files, etc., and fabrication techniques with basic fabrication recipes are presented. The fabrication of micro-optical elements using photolithography has been studied for almost a century, while electron beam lithography (EBL) and focused ion beam (FIB) lithography are relatively new. Hence, for photolithography, only fabrication recipes are provided with a brief explanation of the fundamentals. The chapter is divided into four sections. In Section 8.1, the different methods for designing lithography files are presented. The procedure for fabrication of DOEs using photolithography, EBL, and FIB systems are presented in Sections 8.2, 8.3, and 8.4, respectively.