New Approaches to Titania and Silica CVD

Abstract

The companion article by Mark Allendorf highlights the importance of on-line CVD coating for flat glass manufacture. Two smaller, but fast growing, markets are those of precision optics and telecommunications. Both these markets are driven by the rapidly developing requirement for high throughputs. Current deposition methods rely on PVD techniques that are augmented with cumbersome tooling to move the complex geometries and thereby achieve time-averaged deposition over whole surface areas. Such techniques limit throughput and usually give a non-uniform deposit on parts of the coated sample, necessitating special alignment within an optic system and thereby incurring significant costs.