Sunday, 15 April 2007 17:00

ssia_s West Palm Beach, FL (April 16, 2007) – Coastal Optical Systems has completed installation of an enabling technology for precision asphere testing and manufacture. QED Technologies’ SSI-A™ Interferometer greatly increases accuracy and maximum full aperture that can be tested while reducing lead-time and non-recurring costs previously associated with interferometric testing of aspheres.

“This is an enabling technology for Coastal’s customers looking for high precision, quick turn, or large aperture aspheric optics.” said Jay Kumler, president of Coastal.

Reductions in cost and leadtime

Interferometric testing of aspheres has traditionally required design and fabrication of a null lens or computer-generated holograms for each different aspheric surface.

Leadtimes of 8 weeks and non-recurring costs of greater than $8,000 per aspheric surface for the test optics were typical. Frequently these limitations caused designers to abandon designs with aspheric elements.

The stitching interferometer eliminates the tooling costs and leadtime required with prior measurement strategies.

Higher Accuracies Achievable

QED’s SSI-A™ makes full-aperture interferometric measurements by taking several smaller sub-aperture measurements that cover the entire work surface and automatically stitching the results together. Use of multiple measurements allows removal of inherent measurement noise in the synthesized full aperture data.

Coastal Optical Systems has been manufacturing aspheric optics since its founding in 1991 and manufacturing with QED’s MRF polishing technology since 2002. Coastal has manufactured aspheric optics for multiple space based instruments using the QED MRF polishing technology.

About Coastal Optical Systems, Inc. (www.coastalopt.com)

Coastal Optical Systems, Inc., founded in 1991, designs and manufactures precision lens assemblies for Biomedical, Inspection & Metrology, Defense, Entertainment, Space and Astronomy markets. Coastal Optical Systems, a Florida corporation, is a wholly owned subsidiary of JENOPTIK Laser, Optik, Systeme GmbH (Jena, Germany).