Study on fabrication of 3-D microstructures by synchrotron radiation based on pixels exposed lithography

We report research on the development of a method of fabricating three-dimensional microstructures that uses synchrotron radiation light. Some research on three-dimensional processing methods using SR lithography has already been reported. They have involved techniques of applying exposure energy distributions to resist surfaces. Complicated energy distributions need to be applied to resist surfaces to fabricate arbitrary three-dimensional structures. However, we devised a new method that made it possible to fabricate arbitrary three-dimensional microstructures by using a mask with pattern created function. The advantages of this method are that it is suitable for rapid prototyping and it reduces the fabrication time and cost since it is not necessary to fabricate conventional photolithographic masks. Our research involved a basic experiment on this method of fabrication where we succeeded in fabricating a free-form surface by exposing it through an overlapping array of pixels that created a single aperture. Moreover, the pixel size could be made smaller than the aperture size by overlapping adjoining pixels.