Testing of refractive silicon microlenses by use of a lateral shearing interferometer in transmission

Wave aberrations of refractive photoresist microlenses and silicon microlenses were measured with a lateral shearing interferometer. Because of the silicon elements, a near-infrared working wavelength (lambda = 1.32 mu m) was used. The wave front was evaluated by a phase step technique with four steps. Integration of the phase distributions was performed with a computationally efficient Fourier transformation algorithm. The influence of the detector vidicon nonlinearity on the measured wave front was calculated. The defocusing behavior of the interferometer was investigated by fitting the measured wave fronts with the help of Zernike circle polynomials. It is shown that the reproducibility can be kept below lambda/100 rms. Examples for the measured wave fronts of plano-convex silicon microlenses are discussed in detail. (C) 1998 Optical Society of America.