The Impact of Manufacturing Imperfections on the Performance of Metalenses and a Manufacturing-Tolerant Design Method

Metalenses play an important role in optoelectronic integrated devices, given their advantages in miniaturization and integration. Due to its high aspect ratio subwavelength structure, fabricating metalenses requires a high-level dry etching technology. Consequently, structure deformation of the metalens will exist if the etching process of the material is not mature enough, which will impair the metalens’ performance. In this paper, a polarization-independent InP dielectric metalens is designed to focus the incident light from air into the substrate, which is used for monolithically integrating with the InGaAs/InP photodetector in the future. Subsequently, with the simulation method, we investigated the impact of the structure deformation on the metalens’ performance, which was found in our InP dry etching process development. We have found that the sidewall slope and aspect ratio-dependent etching effect greatly impaired the focusing efficiency because of the phase modulation deviation. To solve this problem, we proposed a manufacturing-tolerant design method, which effectively improved the performance of the device with structural deformation. Our work is instructive for developing metalenses and can accelerate their integration application.