Advanced Technology Coatings win UK SMART award

17 Jun 2002

ATC has received a prestigious award from the UK's Department of Trade and Industry to undertake a feasibility study to investigate the configuration and process technology for the manufacture of ultra-high precision thin film filters to a level currently not available in the UK.

The aim of the feasibility study is to investigate novel techniques that influence and control thin film growth, and to establish the feasibility of integrating them into a fully automated process for filter fabrication to the levels of accuracy required.

The study is particularly relevant to the telecommunications industry where the massive growth in dense wavelength division multiplexing (DWDM) devices has generated a huge requirement for extremely narrow-band thin film filters. Increasingly the major challenges to producers of filters will be achieving tighter specifications, increased volumes, improved yields and cost targets with the potential global market for DWDM filters being estimated as USD 440M by 2003.

The award will help ATC investigate factors that affect the control of the thin film deposition process, and identify techniques to correct process deviations to enable complex ultra-high precision films for telecommunication applications to be manufactured with sufficient accuracy.