Industrial PhD Project by Marc Bernet Garcia

Project: Development of etch process for high volume 20 transmission gratings
Group: Polymer Microsystems
Supervisor: Rafael Taboryski

Project description
The project is an industrial PhD project with Ibsen Photonics. Since 2016, Ibsen Photonics has supplied transmission gratings to several companies that develop and produce Lidar systems. The opportunity to grow this business has increased significantly, and so have the customer requirements for their Lidar systems. Today, the development of 2D gratings for Lidar systems can enable 3D scanning in two axes, offering smaller packaging and potentially reducing the final device cost for a given performance. The possibility to grow in this field depends on the company’s ability to scale up the production of 2D structures efficiently.

The development of Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) modules for autonomous vehicles is characterized by rapid development cycles of new Lidar device designs. The optical element, the grating, is a critical part of these devices, and it is the center of the research project presented here. The grating requires complex designs to enable the applications (eg. 3D scanning, high resolution, and wider field of view). New grating designs must quickly be produced and tested in new device designs, and at the same time be ready for volume production. This requires a well understood and flexible manufacturing process. The main objective of the project is thus to develop a robust manufacturing method to enable the fast fabrication of nano-gratings with high level of uniformity (< 2 % variation across a wafer and wafer-to-wafer) for a wide range of dimensions (period, duty cycle…). The developed method must be compatible with standard cleanroom tools and ready to scale up for mass production.