Thin films, or micro- and nano-scale materials with unique functional properties, enable many clean energy industries, such as lithium-ion batteries, solar cells, and carbon conversion. Minimal-waste manufacturing of high-performance thin films will be vital for achieving society’s net-zero carbon emission goals. Because existing thin film sensors cannot operate within most sections of manufacturing lines, manufacturers often complete hundreds of processing steps before they can test (a small portion of) their products and detect problems. Current thin-film manufacturing thus often yields many low-quality products, or off-spec products that must be discarded. A real-time, in-situ metrology strategy can create unprecedented opportunities for implementation of smart manufacturing practices and advanced process control solutions to realize higher thin film throughput and performance.SirenOpt has developed a real-time low-temperature plasma-based thin film metrology sensor. The sensor is compact, can be integrated within existing manufacturing lines, and can collect multiple thin film property measurements (such as thickness with a precision of 1/10th of a nanometer, density, resistivity, chemical composition, and contaminate identification) in parallel and in real-time, thus allowing for the collection of critical manufacturing data that is otherwise unobtainable. SirenOpt is currently applying the sensor to industrial thin film coating processes such as Lithium-ion battery electrodes, where this flexible sensor can be used to accelerate R&D and process optimization, improve quality control, and enable real-time process control.