Precision Photonics Corporation (PPC) has developed advanced polishing, testing and coating techniques for optical grade silicon material.
By using metrology, wafer-based optical fabrication and PPC’s advanced ion-beam-sputtering (IBS) coatings, the company has produced ultra-flat components repeatedly and in large quantities.
Thickness measurements taken with its laser-based, NIST-traceable SW1500 metrology system confirm total thickness variations (TTV) less than 15nm across a 50mm diameter - a parallelism of less than < .1 arcseconds.
Solid silicon etalons are often used as tunable dispersion compensators and as optical frequency discriminators. Designers can achieve rapid tuning and uniform heat distribution by controlling the transmission properties of the etalon through refractive index modulation. Custom etalons, filters and wafers are available coated or uncoated with surface quality as low as 20/10 in sizes from 1.5 x 1.5mm2 to 100mm diameter.