Process Control

Development of optical technologies and optical devices with higher and higher requirements and tougher parameters from the one hand and the focus on mass market with huge volume and sensitivity to cost and yield demand new level of coating process control.

For any evaporation process accurate deposition rate and thickness control is essential. I-Photonics designed multi crystals heads (changer unite) with fast changing of crystals. It is included in a basic configuration of any ORTUS coater and together with quartz monitor allows to get stable deposition rate and refractive index for optical coatings.

For precision optical interference coatings that consist of tens of layers together with stable refractive index and deposition rate need a tool that controls directly optical parameters of  the filter. The tool which can automatically detect the stop point of every layer with high precision in order to get required specifications of the final filter and a tool which can analyze eventual mistakes in occurred in previous layers and autonomously correct the subsequent layer for compensation.

I-Photonics developed the  Optical Coater Provider (OCP) to control the coating and obtain sophisticated multilayer optical stacks on any kind of PVD or PECVD coating equipment.
Having multiple options and working modes as Broad Band (spectral) and Single Wave control, Transmission and Reflection mode, Stationary and Flying witness OCP is  designed to transform "standard" coaters to efficient high precision coaters  tools that satisfy next generation requirements.

The real-time optimization function controls the result in real time during the coating and in case of deviation from the required one it recalculates and makes  the correction for the next layers to ensure that the final optical coating reaches exactly the required properties.