Optimizing Coatings
OpticStudio is not intended to be an optical coating design program. Optimization of coating designs generally requires some automation of the coating material selection and number of layers.
However, OpticStudio does have the ability to optimize and tolerance coating layer thicknesses, indices, and extinction coefficients, once the number of layers and material selection is made. OpticStudio uses a dimensionless "coating multiplier" which linearly scales the thickness of any layer of a coating, and dimensionless offsets of the index and extinction coefficients. Optimization may then be made on the usual coating performance data using the CODA operand.
To optimize the layer thicknesses or offsets, first define a coating with the correct number of layers and materials for each layer. The initial coating thicknesses should be set to either a known good starting value, or 1 wave (in this latter case the coating multipliers may be interpreted to be in units of waves). Do not use zero for a coating layer thickness as this thickness cannot be linearly scaled. Coating multipliers may not exceed the value 10.0. The initial material index and extinction should be set to 1 and 0, respectively, or to a known good starting value.
Coating multipliers and index offsets may then be defined on the surface coating tab described in the "Coating" section of "Surface Properties" in "The Setup Tab" help file. This feature supports setting the multipliers and index offsets to a variable status, which allows for optimization of the relative coating layer thickness and index of refraction of the coating materials. To constrain the coating multiplier values, see "CMGT" and the related operands "CMLT" and "CMVA" in the " Optimization Operands Summary ". To constrain the index and extinction offsets, see "CIGT" and the related operands "CILT", "CIVA", "CEGT", "CELT", and "CEVA".
Next: