Abstract

Sputtering has become an extremely important and widespread manufacturing process for depositing optical interference coatings. This is due to a number of factors, including the excellent control sputtering offers over deposition rates and film properties, as well as the relative ease of scaling processes to large coating systems. Today there is a very large installed manufacturing base for sputtering optical films on substrates that range in size from small individual elements to architectural glass and continuous webs of polyester. Depositing dielectric materials reproducibly and at the high rates needed for manufacturing presents interesting challenges, however.

© 1995 Optical Society of America