Jun 18 2009
SCHOTT Advanced Optics offers one of the world's largest assortments of optical materials and filters. Now, a sputtering system that has been modified to suit the company's purposes allows for extremely precise coating of large parts of up to 590 mm x 730 mm. The demand for these continues to grow in fields like aviation, industrial sensor technology and medicine.
Optical filters are also put to use in astronomy
Mid-frequency magnetron sputtering is a process that involves high energy. The coating materials, metals and dielectrics, for example, are not applied as vapors, but rather “spray-deposited” during a gas discharge. The coating particles are catapulted against the glass with high energy to form an extremely dense and hard layer, whose thickness can be determined rather precisely. This is ideal for extremely thin optical coatings.
Effective immediately, a wide variety of optical coatings can be applied to large glass formats of up to 590 mm x 730 mm using a mid-frequency magnetron sputtering system that has been modified especially for SCHOTT. Besides protective, anti-reflective and metallic coatings, transparent conductive coatings that consist of indium tin oxide (ITO), for instance, or other conductive and transparent layers, but also other types of hard layers that guard against scratches, are now possible.
“The demand for large coated specialized glasses for applications in aviation, for manufacturing scratch-resistant and anti-reflective instrument displays, for instance, continues to grow” explains Helge Vogt, Product Manager Optical Filters at SCHOTT Advanced Optics in Mainz (Germany). “However, larger and larger glass substrates are also being used in industrial sensor technology and medical technology, to manufacture structured microarrays, for example. Protective layers for humidity-sensitive filter glasses and optical glasses are also currently under development at SCHOTT.
Besides these enhanced coating technologies, SCHOTT Advanced Optics offers a large portfolio of optical glass filters that spans more than 50 filters made of colored glass, as well as a wide variety of customer-specific interference filters. These are mainly put to use in the automotive and aviation fields, i.e. as contrast enhancement filters, as well as in classical optics to block or absorb specific wavelengths. An experienced application team supports the clients in selecting just the right solution for their application.
SCHOTT is an international technology group that sees its core purpose as the lasting improvement of living and working conditions. To this end, the company has been developing special materials, components and systems for 125 years. The main areas of focus are the household appliances industry, pharmaceuticals, solar energy, electronics, optics and the automotive industry. The SCHOTT Group is present in close proximity to its customers with production and sales companies in all its major markets. The Group's approximately 17,300 employees generated worldwide sales of approximately 2.2 billion Euros in the fiscal year 2007/2008. The company's technological and economic expertise is closely linked with its social and ecological responsibility. The SCHOTT AG is an affiliate of the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung (Foundation).