A Guide to Tolerancing of Optical Coatings

In this webcast on tolerancing of optical coatings, Angus Macleod of the Thin Film Center attempts to answer the primary question, “Can this coating be successfully manufactured?” Macleod discusses the range of tolerancing techniques and their development over time, including the concept of sensitivity; the advent of Monte Carlo methods; and, supplementing the Monte Carlo models and replacing the idea of sensitivity, the concept of performance envelopes that represent the full range of performance variation that can be caused by layer thickness errors of any magnitude. He discusses how the idea of tolerances cannot be separated from the process of monitoring during coating deposition, and talks about how process simulation using Monte Carlo principles is the ultimate technique, sometimes called computational manufacture, and how performance can be perturbed by other errors in manufacture such as departures from uniformity.