Automated construction of monochromatic monitoring strategies.

Abstract

We focus our efforts on development of an advanced monochromatic monitoring strategy to assist the optical coating engineer in finding a single wavelength or a sequence of monitoring wavelengths that meet simultaneously several practical demands, namely, specified input and output swing values, specified amplitude of a monitoring signal variation, and the distance between trigger point and the last signal extremum. Additionally, the most important demand is that the number of different monitoring wavelengths must be as small as possible. Manual construction of such a monitoring strategy is almost impossible because of a large number of conditions to be satisfied. We propose an algorithm that automatically generates a monitoring spreadsheet so that all demands can be satisfied as closely as possible. We consider six typical design problems and obtain a series of solutions for each of them. Then, we provide computational simulations of deposition processes assuming that they are controlled by monochromatic monitoring with the monitoring strategy generated by our algorithm, and we demonstrate how an optical coating engineer can select design solutions that exhibit the highest production yields.