3 ms·

> Most of all, the thing I'd be intersted in is how resistant to error is the design? I feel like this is what keeps the most impressive research out of real w

by venning 10y ago

> Most of all, the thing I'd be intersted in is how resistant to error is the design? I feel like this is what keeps the most impressive research out of real world application. Yeah, manufacturing is expensive, but tolerances are just so much more controllable in a lab. Manufacturing also produces revenue, whereas funding the years of research necessary just to figure out a new nanometer-precise process is a hard investment for most companies to swallow, especially if the end product isn't guaranteed to produce a profit itself.

eru 10y ago
> Yeah, manufacturing is expensive, but tolerances are just so much more controllable in a lab. Not least because, in a lab you are happy if one out of ten prototypes work for your experiment. You don't want 90% spoil in manufacturing.
HCIdivision17 10y ago
The good news is that the processes I described above are already well established. The trick is always in the dirty, nasty details, but in this case I'd be bullishly optimistic. I haven't personally worked on a large batch coater, so I can't attest to how hard it is to tune the things in, but your typical coater engineer is a bit eccentric anyhow and will no doubt make it work. See, the weird bit of how these coatings work is that it's fairly easy to empirically tune the damn things to be angstrom accurate (-ish), but the geometry of how the material is sprayed messes up the uniformity, which in turn ruins your yields (one square centimeter in the center is good, chuck the rest!). But if the coating can withstand some variation between layers, tuning it such that the layers sorta cancel out in the bulk, you'll lose the efficiency, but your yield can absolutely skyrocket. There will likely be key layers at the optical half, quarter, eighth, etc. thicknesses, but if you get enough layers you can probably get away with a lot. You can also just build really neat source geometries to sorta flatten out the spray over a larger area, but that's something I never worked on. My ignorance of this sort of coating has me worry about it immediately destroying itself from the insane material stresses... Though no idea how well it'll anneal after 1000 hours of constant heat (or worse: on-off heat-cooling cycles!) But since they're all oxides and likely put down together while the substrate stays hot, I bet it works out ok.

by venning 10y ago

eru 10y ago

> Yeah, manufacturing is expensive, but tolerances are just so much more controllable in a lab. Not least because, in a lab you are happy if one out of ten prototypes work for your experiment. You don't want 90% spoil in manufacturing.

HCIdivision17 10y ago

The good news is that the processes I described above are already well established. The trick is always in the dirty, nasty details, but in this case I'd be bullishly optimistic. I haven't personally worked on a large batch coater, so I can't attest to how hard it is to tune the things in, but your typical coater engineer is a bit eccentric anyhow and will no doubt make it work. See, the weird bit of how these coatings work is that it's fairly easy to empirically tune the damn things to be angstrom accurate (-ish), but the geometry of how the material is sprayed messes up the uniformity, which in turn ruins your yields (one square centimeter in the center is good, chuck the rest!). But if the coating can withstand some variation between layers, tuning it such that the layers sorta cancel out in the bulk, you'll lose the efficiency, but your yield can absolutely skyrocket. There will likely be key layers at the optical half, quarter, eighth, etc. thicknesses, but if you get enough layers you can probably get away with a lot. You can also just build really neat source geometries to sorta flatten out the spray over a larger area, but that's something I never worked on. My ignorance of this sort of coating has me worry about it immediately destroying itself from the insane material stresses... Though no idea how well it'll anneal after 1000 hours of constant heat (or worse: on-off heat-cooling cycles!) But since they're all oxides and likely put down together while the substrate stays hot, I bet it works out ok.