Correction of a digital micromirror device lithography system for fabrication of a pixelated liquid crystal micropolarizer array

The combination of a digital micromirror device (DMD) lithography system and a rotatable polarizer provides a simple and convenient method to achieve the pixelated liquid crystal micropolarizer (LCMP) array for polarization imaging. In this paper, two crucial problems restricting the high-precision fabrication of LCMP array are pointed out and settled: the dislocation of LCMP pixels caused by parallelism error of the rotating polarizer and the grid defect caused by the gap between micromirrors. After correction, the maximum deviation of the fabricated LCMP pixels was reduced from 3.23 mu m to 0.11 mu m and the grid defect is eliminated. The correction method reported here lays a good foundation for the fine processing of liquid crystal devices with arbitrary photoalignment structure by using the DMD system. (C) 2022 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement