Today they achieve 1, 2, or 3 picometers accuracy. Recently for a customer from Ireland, the team worked with wavelengths of 2.745 nm. This meant building up 2,000 layers that were between 0.1 nm and 0.6 nm thick each. One of the key parameters was to ensure that the first layer in the multilayer stack has exactly the same thickness as the last one. “The machine needs to be stable over 12 hours to achieve this. With NESSY, Bühler made that happen. It is an engineering masterpiece,” says Dr. Feigl.
For Klaus Herbig, Head of Market Segment Precision Optics at Bühler Leybold Optics, it is still astonishing what the optiX fab team achieves – even though he has worked with them
since the beginning. “Their technology input is at the physi-cal edge,” he says. “We know how to build the machine that does the coating with unmatched levels of layer precision. They know how to combine the different materials and to keep them stable over time. They have to understand the process well to do it properly. The success relies on their skill.”