The LightMachinery Blog

Online thin film coating design software

2007-06-25T07:02:00.000-07:00

We have made major improvements to our free online optical design software in the past few months.

The most significant changes have been made to our thin film coating design package. The software now enables users to design up to 12 layer coatings quickly and easily. It even calculates polarization effects and accounts for the angle of incidence.

It's no TFCalc, Essential MacLeod, or FilmStar but it is a remarkably powerful tool. Even someone who has no idea how to design coatings can follow the simple instructions and design a good AR in about 5 minutes.

Fluid Jet Polishing is turning heads

2006-08-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

We started running ads in Photonics Spectra over the summer to help generate interest in our new fluid jet polishing technology. The ads worked.

Requests for more information have been numerous.

We are working on the final details (mostly user-interface features) of a new fluid jet polishing machine and we expect to be able to formally introduce our machine within the next few weeks.

In the meantime, feel free to contact us for more information about fluid jet polishing and what it can do for you.

Galvo Mirrors

2005-10-26T10:38:00.000-07:00

We added galvo mirrors to our website this week after our sales engineer pointed out that they were strangely absent.

If you have a tight tolerance or prototype galvo mirror requirement, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Photonics West, Supplier Awards, and completed expansion

2006-02-27T07:00:00.000-08:00

We were very pleased to recognize four of our most reliable suppliers with Superior Performance awards at Photonics West in San Jose.

United Lens, Mindrum Precision, Corning (Canton NY), and Iridian Spectral Technologies received the awards. All four have enabled us to meet our goals by delivering quality product, on-time, and at reasonable prices.

Meanwhile, our facility expansion is complete. We have found space for everyone and everything just in time to respond to a number of orders for tunable etalons and thin etalons from our online catalog.

Calculator Support Forum launches

2005-10-07T10:14:00.000-07:00

We launched a support forum (http://lightmachinery.com/phpBB2/) for our optical design calculators today.

The calculators, located at http://www.lightmachinery.com/optical-calculations.php, are growing in popularity and as a result we are handling an increasing volume of questions from users. The support forum will allow users to look up answers to commonly asked questions, ask their own questions, or assist other users.

If you haven't already tried our optical calculators - you should. We use them every day.

Thin Etalons for Laser Line Narrowing

2005-09-30T13:11:00.000-07:00

We added thin etalons, 25 microns thick, to our online catalog today.

Our customers have been using these to line narrow their lasers.

At 2mm x 4mm they are quite robust, but have been a little bit tricky to package.

You can link to directly to the thin etalon product page here:
http://lightmachinery.com/catalog/product_info.php/cPath/21_26/products_id/43

New calculator for line narrowing lasers with etalons

2005-09-30T11:59:00.000-07:00

We have released a beta version of our laser line narrowing calculator. If you want to line narrow your laser using an etalon, or series of etalons, you should check this out.

The calculator allows you to define design parameters for your laser cavity and two etalons, then resolves the laser output for your defined configuration.

http://www.lightmachinery.com/etalon-combiner-r4.php

Renovations almost complete

2005-09-16T05:39:00.000-07:00

Work to prepare some newly acquired space at the National Research Council's Industrial Partnership Facility is almost complete.

As demand for custom optics - especially tunable etalons - has grown, we have felt increasing pressure to consolidate our operations in a single facility. This most recent expansion will make consolidation possible.

The new space will provide dedicated work centers for each of manufacturing units, optical grinding, crystal polishing, flat optics, prisms, and CNC polishing.
Other highlights:

Our stock room will be moved to a much larger space to accomodate our growing inventory.
Our new dedicated IR coating chamber is expected to come online in the first week of October.

Catalog of Precision Optics

2005-07-19T19:10:00.000-07:00

This week we will be launching our catalog of high precision semi-custom optical components. This means that we will be offering many of our popular etalon and beam splitter products with a range of specifications that can be specified by our customers to meets their requirements.

The catalog will include a range piezo tunable etalons that cover 4 wavelength bands. The exact nominal gap however is specified by the customer. The Free Spectral Range, FSR, can be calculated using on our online etalon calculator. Once we have this final parameter we can take a semi-finished etalon and complete it for shipment.

Our first beam splitters will be interferometer quality beam splitter cubes designed to enable engineers and scientists to build michelson interferometers using external mirrors.

Let us know what you think.

More Space Required

2005-06-28T12:45:00.000-07:00

The steady growth of business at LightMachinery has created a steady squeeze on our available space. Over the next few months we will be adding more lab space within the Institute for Microstructural Science at the National Research Council of Canada. The labs in the M-23A building are facing East, which is ideal for maintaining a bright work environment without too much heat loading from afternoon sunshine. Constant temperature is essential for precision optical manufacturing since glass and equipment properties change quickly with temperture. The labs have been freshly painted and new floors have been installed. Once a little more power and water has been added we will be relocating some of our precision polishing equipment to the new space. The move will be in small steps over the next 6 months and will not affect customer commitments. The added capacity will enable our team to focus on the production of new standard ultra-high accuracy beam splitters and etalons.

Solid Etalons

2005-04-11T05:51:00.000-07:00

You might be interested in some of the changes to our etalon page at http://www.lightmachinery.com/fabry-perot-etalons.html.

One of the recent additions is this picture of a production lot (we call it a block) of solid etalons.

Meanwhile, our etalon calculator continues to be popular. Thanks to feedback from regular users, we continue to add new features such as reflectivity, tilt, surface-figure, and diffraction limited finesse calculations.

LightMachinery welcomes ATL Lasertechnik

2005-03-07T06:09:00.000-08:00

This week we are pleased to add excimer lasers from ATL to the products that we offer our North American customers. ATL manufactures a very well engineered small excimer laser that is a perfect compliment to the large excimers that we currently distribute for GSI Lumonics. The ATL lasers have a small gas volume and are very economical to operate. These lasers are simple to integrate to micro-machining workstations from Optec, for hole drilling and micromachining of delicate components. In addtion, the short pulse length of a few nanoseconds is important to customers in spectroscopy and other scientific applications. Check out the ATL lasers on our excimer page.

Encouraging signs

2005-02-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

For those of us that lived through the great rise and fall of telecom demand, things have seemed pretty quiet for the last few years. Recently business from that sector seems to be picking up a bit and we are pleased to have added a some new Telecom customers. This sector has always provided some unique and interesting challenges, pushing the limits of conventional optical manufacuring and coating technology. Micro-optics, tiny prisms, beam splitters, attenuators, little air spaced etalons, optically contacted parts, micro michelson interferometers, tricky coatings and everything diced up into 1.5mm x 2.5mm components are typical of the tough requirements of the telecom industry. Fortunately all the techniques used to make large lambda/50 apply nicely to making tiny devices and the longer telecom wavelengths at 1550nm in the near IR make things a little easier as well. If only we didn't have to use tweezers...

Standard versus Custom Optics

2004-12-13T09:03:00.000-08:00

The difference between standard optics and custom optics seems obvious but turns out to be kind of subtle. We manufacture lots of custom optics, we help customers sort out thier design specifications, we purchase special glass types, shape the glass, polish , coat and assemble the optics and test the final assembly. Many of these are truly one of a kind components and the costs of each step need to be paid by our customers.

We also make a lot of parts that are very similar, solid etalons, air spaced etalons, tunable etalons. Each customer has a slight variation on the specifications that prevents making large batches and keeping part in stock but some of the operations can be combined. For instance a 1/cm solid etalon, is a standard thickness of glass but most customers require a particular coating specification. However we can manufacture the standard etalon substrates in batches and then pass savings along to our customers.

Finally, we do get requests for identical or almost identical parts where a standard would satisfy the needs of many customers. We often get requests for very accurate beam splitters that can form the basis for michelson interferometers. It seems that a standard 1/2" cube with a broad visible beam splitter coating and anti-reflection coated sides will satisfy many people in R&D labs that would like to build a micheslon with external mirrors. These parts are identical and we will actually make them in batches and keep them in stock.

So we will be adding some of these products (etalons, tunable etalon, michelson beam splitter cubes) to a short list of standard high accuracy optics. We will never has a long list of "off the shelf" lenses like Melles Griot, CVI or Thor Labs but we will be able to make ultra-precision optics a little more affordable.

A Small World

2004-12-03T06:05:00.000-08:00

The world seems to get smaller everyday. We welcomed visitors from Japan this week and had some excellent discussions. Etalons that we produced for a customer in Taiwan are shipping today and we have begun work this week on a lens assembly for a customer in Germany. Our waveplate assembly and testing continues for Lockheed Martin in California, we are really pushing the envelope of waveplate measurement technology on this polarizing HMI michelson. We also completed some long pulse CO2 laser tests this week for a customer in northern California and the results are very encouraging. California seems to be home to a high concentration of our customers, perhaps we should consider relocation...

Etalon Designer - revision 2.0

2004-11-29T05:27:00.000-08:00

A new version of the etalon designer has now been posted. This version helps to connect the theory of etalons with practical and achievable optical manufacturing specifications. After entering the basic parameters for the etalon calculation the user then selects an optical flatness specification and a tilt or parallelism spec. A limited number of flatness and tilt choices are provided and these correspond to different levels of optical manufacturing heroics, from lambda/20 to lambda/200 ($$'s).. Similar choices are available for the tilt between the two end surfaces, from 1 arc second to 0.1 arc seconds. The calculator then uses a combination of textbook formulas and our own rules of thumb to come up with an expected finesse and transmission. Both the theoretical and expected practical performance of the etalon are plotted in a graph that shows two etalon peaks in enough detail to see the bandwidth and transmission. Peak position for the two peaks is also listed under the graph since the scale on the graph does not have enough resolution to provide an accurate number.

Exact Ray Trace with Spot Diagrams

2004-11-21T11:27:00.000-08:00

So once we got the ball rolling on the ray tracing with the paraxial ray trace we just kept going. Another week of programming and we had a very respectable web based exact ray trace program that can actually be used to design some pretty sophisticated multi-element lens systems. Sure, it is not quite Zemax or Code V or Oslo but what the hey, it's free and it's on line. Use it anywhere. At 500K it takes a few seconds to download, enter the prescription for up to 9 surfaces, click anywhere and zap your exact ray trace with third order aberrations and three spot diagrams is complete. The program traces a total of 39 rays, 13 each from on axis, full object height and half the object height. The program also allows the user to manually adjust position of the image plane to focus the image (minimize the spot sizes). Let us know if you have any thoughts or suggestions on our latest addition to our optical calculations.

Paraxial Ray Trace

2004-11-15T14:26:00.000-08:00

So this morning we add a new optical design tool, the Paraxial Ray Trace. It is a convenient little on-line program that allows the user to enter up to 9 surfaces and then the software determines the focal length, aperture stop, field stop, F number, image size, image distance, magnification and entrance pupil diameter of the lens system. It is not a lens design program but a lens system design program that is really the first step in doing a more detailed design. All of our optical calculations provide simple, quick answers to common optical problems that crop up all day long. Feel free to contact us anytime and let us know if there are any other calculations that would be helpful

The Road to ISO

2004-11-12T19:49:00.000-08:00

At LightMachinery we strive to exceed our customer's expectations 100% of the time. Quality improvement through individual effort and team work is the job of every employee. We are proud of our products and we are constantly innovating new processes both for manufacturing and for business systems. But if a customer asks "are you ISO registered" we must say "no, we have a quality system but we are not registered." It isn't the bold proud statement we would like to make about our new company, it feels like we are missing something. So we have started down the road of ISO 9001:2000 registration. Our goal is to complete the registration process by the end of 2005 and we will keep you up to date on our progress.

The Shop is Buzzing with Activity

2004-11-12T06:38:00.000-08:00

It's Friday and the shop is buzzing with activity. Ian and Jeff are looking after the folks from Lockheed and Stanford that have come up to review the Solar Dynamics Observatory, HMI project and I am starting a Blog... The latest confocal etalons sets are just about finished and the new grinding wheel for the edger is being installed. The latest chrome on gold coating run looks great and we have pictures on the website already. Steve spent the day yesterday shipping spare parts to customers all over North America and Lydia is spending the day today invoicing. Gregg is, as usual, perfecting the MRP to make sure everything ships a little early...

Laser Optics Out the Door

2004-11-12T13:30:00.000-08:00

More front and rear optics sets shipping to laser drilling customers today. More material arrived from our key suppliers, fluorides from Corning and H4 from Schott for the Helioseismic & Magnetic Imager project. More Zinc Selenide also arrived today, destined to be turned into prisms. Our database system is really the key to keeping the right balance of raw material, semifinished and finished parts on the shelf at all time.