Wafer-molded glass optics
Kaleido Technology's wafer-molding of aspheric glass lenses is the solution for tomorrow's cost-effective manufacturing of high-precision optics for consumer applications.
Use
of extremely low-cost wafer preforms combined with a high number of
lenses per cycle ensures competitive prices that will open doors to
applications, where the cost of glass optics has hitherto been
prohibitive.
By further use of Kaleido's glass wafers as a building blocks in wafer-based integration technologies, assembly can take place at the wafer level, bringing optics module manufacturing to unprecedented efficiency.
Compared to other wafer-based solutions, Kaleido's wafer-molding approach has the following benefits:
- Molding of a wide range of glass types gives the ability to design and manufacture aspheric lenses tailored to any imaging application
- Kaleido-lenses are all-glass lenses which compared to hybrid solutions provides many more degrees of freedom because a wide range of glass types can be used.
- Molding technology is extremely tolerant to local thickness variations of the glass wafer, as there will be a total reflow and redistribution of the glass yielding uniform thickness of the wafers
- Molding technology gives the opportunity to mold both convex and concave surfaces as well as double sided aspheres, including bi-convex, bi-concave and meniscus lenses
Kaleido's wafer-molding process offers the following specifications:
| Features | |
|
Wafer dimension, diameter |
< 100 mm |
|
Lens radius of curvature |
0.8 mm < r < infinity |
|
Lens profile |
Spheric, aspheric |
|
Lens characteristics |
Convex, concave, bi-convex, bi-concave, meniscus |
|
Lens diatemeter |
1 mm < dia. < 10 mm |
|
Tolerances |
|
|
Lens power error |
< 0.3 µm (PV) |
|
Lens irregularity error |
< 0.3 µm (PV) |
|
Surface finish |
< 5 nm (RMS) |
|
Pitch error (lens-to-lens distance) |
< 5 µm |