Femtosecond laser Two-photon microfabrication control and monitoring system based on virtual instruments

Femtosecond (fs) laser Two-photon Microfabrication is a new true 3D microstructure fabricating method with sub-micron resolution power based on the characteristic of fs laser that ultrahigh peak intensity can be achieved at low pulse energy, and the photopolymerization induced by two-photon absorption can be tightly confined in one limited focus. According to the elementary idea of this fabricating method, a control and monitoring system developed in the Virtual Instruments environment, LabVIEW, is proposed in this paper. In order to ensure the movement accuracy of the machining system that is the crucial factor influencing the figure error of the final 3D microstructures, a micro displacement driver and position data acquisition program is designed. Through the error compensation, the minimum error of the actual processing track from design track can be obtained. Based on machine vision conception, a vision monitoring system is used to acquire the image of the single polymerization layer, find the machining defects and obtain the compensation data. Integral control and monitoring system improves the machining accuracy and has user friendly interface.