Design and fabrication of a wafer-level lens module using UV polymer and glass lenses

Abstract

Wafer-level lens module comprising of a glass lens as well as polymer lenses is developed for 5 mega-pixel mobile phone camera. A few institutes and companies have been tried wafer-level lens modules so far, but all of them are made of only UV curable polymer lenses which have the limitation in resolving power. We designed and fabricated waferlevel lens module which comprises of a glass lens and two UV curable polymer lenses. Glass lenses are molded one by one and reconstructed as an array on a wafer by the specially designed precision alignment technique. Polymer lenses are fabricated by typical replication and UV curing process. Optical evaluation is carried out and it is shown that the quality of the images captured by the fabricated wafer-level lens module is comparable with that of a commercial 5 mega pixel phone camera. It is expected that the hybrid type wafer level lens module (with glass and polymer lenses) is a promising solution for the high resolution and low cost phone camera in the future.