Coating Fixtures
EES can design and manufacture the coating fixtures used during thin film deposition. Our background in optics gives us an advantage when it comes to the design and manufacture of vacuum fixtures. EES was founded on a background of over 6 years in the optics industry with experience in tooling design and management, fabrication, R&D, thin film coating design, and calibration and production on the coating platforms. Coating platforms included Ion Beam Sputtering (IBS) on Veeco Spector and proprietary machines, magnetron, and E-Beam (with APS). Our hands on experience is what helps us understand the true requirements of a vacuum coating fixture and allows us to design a better product for our customers.
We have designed over 1000 vacuum coating fixtures used to coat many different optical products including standard flat optics (round, rectangular, oval, and custom), lenses, YAG rods, ends of fiber optics, crystals (LBO, BBO, PPLN etc.), and complete optical systems, such as deformable mirrors. Part sizes have ranged from 0.039” diameter GRIN lenses up to 6.0” diameter by 3.0” thick optics with polished OD and bevels. We enjoy the challenge of how to efficiently hold and coat a new custom optic.
We design and manufacture the vacuum coating fixtures themselves as well as all supporting tooling. This can include vacuum spin chucks, inspection fixtures, alignment jigs and metrology equipment. We can design entire systems or subsystems such as scanning breadboards for the interferometers, or custom light sources. We even offer to come to your facility to gather requirements and data as well as to train technicians on the proper use of equipment we have designed. All coating tools we design can be delivered with the necessary hardware and cleaning if desired. This includes bead blasting and vacuum cleaning. We have experience handling delicate optics and we can load tooling and/or chambers if desired.
When you combine our optics experience with our machining ability it makes our products stand out among the competition. The result is coating fixtures that are designed with manufacturing methods in mind which saves time and cost. There are some tricks that we have learned when it comes to machining of optical fixtures that other machine shops may not be accustomed to. This includes methods to control burr formation so that the burs are not toward an optical surface, methods of indexing double sided coating tool so front side chamfers line up with backside features easily, and angle indexing methods that often produce parts that are accurate in angle to +/-2 arcmins.
We can design coat tools with a feature that allows them to be re-indexed very easily if they need re-worked. For example if substrates come in oversize we can shave off a few thousandths around each pocket by simply dropping the tool on a fixture and modifying the program. We stock blanks for different coating formats for our repeat customers so we can hand deliver a tool in 24 hours in emergency situations. Please call us today and let us know your coating fixture needs.
