Fabrication of free-form micro-optics: design assessment for manufacturability

Free-form micro-optical arrays (FMOAs) gain increasing interest because they can overcome some limitations of rotationally symmetric optical components and because of the benefits of their microscopic dimensions. They enable better performance and compactness of optical devices. However, the complex and segmented surface shapes bring many challenges, from design to fabrication to quality control. In particular, for FMOA designs that contain many individual free-form elements, their manufacturability assessment is far from trivial. Here, we present computer-aided design (CAD)-based tools that analyze FMOA designs for manufacturing constraints so that critical parts can be identified at an early stage, reducing time-consuming and costly adjustments at a later stage. The CAD tools are of great support to quickly and reliably analyze FMOA designs containing several hundred individual elements in an automated manner. They have been developed as user-oriented tools that require little software knowledge and display the results with great visual clarity