Laser Drilling on Elastomeric Polymers

Elastomeric polymers have been used as moulds for fabricating micro structures in the soft lithography technology due to their elastic features and unstickiness to polymer features. Previously, the micro moulds were normally produced by imprinting on micro prototypes, which are fabricated using deep reactive etching or photolithography. In this paper, we introduce a direct mould fabrication method, which uses pulsed laser drilling technology to directly generate high aspect ratio patterns in elastomeric polymers. The effects of laser parameters such as pulse repetition rate and average power on the drilling qualities are systematically studied. The techniques presented in this paper would provide a more flexible way to fabricate high aspect ratio micro features on elastomer mould efficiently.