High-quality large-magnification polymer lens from needle moving technique and thermal assisted moldless fabrication process

Abstract

The need of mobile microscope is escalating as well as the demand of high quality optical components in low price. We report here a novel needle moving technique to fabricate milli-size lens together with thermal assist moldless method. Our proposed protocol is able to create a high tensile strength structure of the lens and its base which is beneficial for exploiting in convertinga smart phone to be a digital microscope. We observe that no bubble trapped in a lens when this technique is performed which can overcome a challenge problem found in a typical dropping technique. We demonstrate the symmetry, smoothness and micron-scale resolution of the fabricated structure. This proposed technique is promising to serve as high quality control mass production without any expensive equipment required. © 2016 Amarit et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.