Resources

PRODUCT DATASHEETS

Sunshade Thermal Control Material

Sunshade, a thermal control material are utilized on satellite radar domes (radomes) to reject incident solar heat radiation while simultaneously allowing radio frequencies to pass unattenuated.

Flexible Sputtered Coatings

DSI’s extensive experience in developing coating methods for flexible coatings has led to a number of industry-leading innovations.

Infrared Narrow Bandpass Filters

DSI has many years of experience producing infrared narrow bandpass filters for use in the MWIR through LWIR. The coatings are produced by either sputtering or evaporation. they are durable and can be used in a broad range of operating environments.

Patterned Thin Film Optical Filters

DSI’s photolithography capability produces precision patterned thin film coatings (including bandpass filters, dark mirrors, and metals) on substrates up to 6 inches in diameter. Patterning can be performed at the wafer level, or on individual parts.

Absorption (Dark Mirror) Coatings

Dark coatings absorb incident light, rather than reflecting or transmitting it. they exhibit both the low transmittance of a metal and the low reflectance of an antireflection coating.

General Capabilities Brochure

DSI’s General Capabilities Brochure provides information on a wide variety of highly reliable, durable, and heat-resistance optical coatings. Our exclusive technologies and custom deposition chambers offer coatings from the Visible(VIS) through the infrared longwave infrared (LWIR) spectral wavelengths.

Hand Cleaning of Small Coated Optics

This note describes the procedure for hand cleaning of small (≤ 2 inch diameter) thin film coated optics. The steps presented are safe for the vast majority of optical coatings, which are typically composed of durable dielectric and semiconductor materials.

ARTICLES

Coating Technology Enables Effective Missile Countermeasures

Infrared countermeasures often require high performing optical coatings, but operating extremes pose a challenge to manufacturers. Read how the DSI team uses proprietary technology and unique sputtering techniques to overcome these challenges to deliver on optimal performance. Heat-seeking missiles have been in use against both rotorcraft and fixed wing aircraft since the mid-1950s, and countermeasures […]

Specifying Coatings for Military and Aerospace Applications

This article describes how coating fabrication technology impacts spectral performance and physical characteristics, and also examines which specifications tend to drive cost. The goal is to enable military optics buyers to properly qualify their vendors, while helping them avoid specifying optics in ways which unnecessarily increase price.

Specifying Optical Filters for Sensor Applications

There are many subtleties that should be addressed in order to properly specify optical filters for a given application. In sensor applications, these subtleties are especially crucial in designing the best possible filter for each sensing task. For purposes of this discussion, we’ll begin with bandpass filters.

Hyperspectral Imaging

Hyperspectral imaging has grown increasingly popular over the past ten years in military, industrial, and scientific arenas. The ability to precisely characterize the color of a viewed item, whether a camouflaged vehicle, a bruise on an arm or on fruit, or a wide swath of vegetation,

Optics And Photonics Technology In Medical Devices: Go Small Or Go Home

The medical device industry is a rapidly growing area of opportunity for optics and photonics technology, with applications ranging from diagnostics to surgical tools to therapeutics. During the SPIE Optics + Photonics 2013 show last month, I had the opportunity to speak with executives at several optics and photonics companies that serve the medical market, discussing with them the challenges associated with the medical space, the future outlook for the sector, and more.

Specialized Thin Film Coatings for Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Unmanned aerial systems are making increased use of advanced optical thin film coatings to provide enhanced detection capabilities beyond those available in the visible and near-infrared wavelength ranges. To learn more, read the feature article on page 60.

Optical Filters Take Food Inspection to a Whole New Level

Multispectral machine vision systems are one way to speed up quality control on production lines, and to make sure our food is safe for consumption.

Optical Thin Film Coating Methods

Thin films and thin-film technology have played an important role in photovoltaic (PV) power generation for terrestrial and space-qualified applications

WHITE PAPERS

Applying Optical Coatings to Flexible Substrates

Gone are the days of designing a system exclusively around traditional, flat, rigid optical shapes. This white paper describes applying optical coatings to flexible substrates. Advances in optical coatings and coating processes enable optical design engineers to test the limits of coated, curved.

Versatile Reactive Sputtering

Reactive sputtering is a thin film deposition technique that delivers dense coatings which are more stable in the presence of temperature and humidity changes than evaporated films. This e-book details how reactive sputtering operates and reviews some of its most important applications.

WEBINARS

Coating Design Webinar

DSI’s Evan Craves, Chemical Engineer, discusses popular types of optical thin film coatings, what they do, and how they are used. In this webinar with Tech Briefs, Evan highlighted DSI’s low-pressure chemical vapor deposition coatings (LPCVD). Download the webinar to review the discussion.

VIDEOS

Play Video

How To Specify Optical Coatings For Sensor Applications

With over 30 years of optical coating experience, Deposition Sciences, Inc. has learned a thing or two about the intricacies of our specifications. This year at SPIE’s DCS exhibition, Kevin Gibbons offers some advice on what you should consider before determining an optical coating’s specifications for sensing applications.

DSI Thin Film Coating Technologies

An optical thin film consists of one or more layers of dielectric material or metal, with individual layer thicknesses typically ranging from a few nanometers to several microns. In the case of dielectrics, these modify the reflectance and transmittance characteristics of the underlying substrate through the mechanism of optical interference, based on the exact thickness

Read more >

Photolithography Technology

The drive towards smaller sensors, often integrated on monolithic substrates with other processing electronics, has created a need for coatings directly on semiconductor wafers, or on miniaturized substrates that can readily be assembled with active devices. DSI utilizes photolithography to produce a wide array of precision patterned thin film coatings (such as antireflection coatings, bandpass filters, dark mirrors, and metals), with feature sizes as small as 5 µm, on substrates up to 8 inches in diameter.

Read more >

MicroDyn® Technology

MicroDyn® is DSI’s proprietary version of magnetron sputtering optimized for high throughput. MicroDyn® utilizes an octagonally shaped chamber, where electrically conductive (metal or semiconductor) coating targets are arranged around the periphery, and the parts to be coated are held on a cylindrical rotating drum concentric within the chamber. Unlike other optical coating methods, sputtering does not require heating the coated parts. This allows the technique to be used on a wide range of substrate materials, as well as on assemblies that may incorporate plastic parts.

Read more >