Optical Monitoring System Improves Thin-Film Coating Accuracy

By Dan Bukaty, Jr., Precision Glass & Optics (PG&O)

Many challenges are associated with enabling greater accuracies in optical thin-film coatings. In the past, a thin-film design software was used to help develop the coating, but the real challenge was in actually replicating the design thickness and the material indexes inside the coating chamber, without any errors. Precision Glass & Optics (PG&O) offers a real-time optical monitoring system – the IDEM system – that can calculate the thickness of each layer to within 1 nm of the design thickness, and show what the index dispersion is during the coating process, so that any concerns may be immediately dealt with in the design process. Download the full white paper to learn more about this system's process and how it makes new optical thin films approximately 10x more precise than ever before.