Optical Design Capabilities

Since 1965 Special Optics has designed and manufactured thousands of unique lens systems. Our optical design team has cataloged base designs ranging from laser beam expanders, telecentric scanning lenses, laser projection optics and UV objective lenses to long range surveillance lenses, Hyperspectral SWIR lenses, and IR zoom lenses. Having a large library of lens designs allows us to meet your design needs without disproportionate design costs. This means that we rarely have to design a system from "scratch." We simply choose a base design, and modify and re-optimize to meet the necessary requirements. In this way the customer need not compromise performance by being forced to choose a standard off-the-shelf lens but, instead, can obtain an exact design without incurring extreme design charges.

Lens Manufacture Capabilities		Assembly Capabilities
Glass and Crystal Polishing Precision Grinding and Polishing of Optics from 4 to 280 mm in Diameter Over 1000 Test Plates on Hand Surface Regularity Better than 1/20 Wave 10-5 Surface Quality Interferometric Testing Standard Radii from 2 to 13,931 mm		Air-Space Tolerances Held to 1 Micron Continuous Lens Design Reoptimization During Assembly Centration, Wedge and Tilt Tolerances Held to Better than 1 Micron Air-Bearing Spindles Laser Alignment
Lens Testing Capabilities		Coating Capabilities
Phase Shift Interferometry Radius Measurement to Within 1 Micron Sagittal Height Centration to within 1 Arcsecond Flatness and Regularity to Within 1/20 Wave Transmission and Reflection Wavefront Error Effective Focal Length		Broadband and "V" Anti-reflection Coatings Double- and Triple-"V" Designs > 500 MW/cm2 Damage Threshold 248-2200 nm Range Capability In-house Thin Film Design

Manufacturing Tolerances