Precision Optics

Our deep experience with polymer optics affirms the links between success, collaboration, and integration. These concepts are at the center of how we work. Integration leads to reducing costs while exceeding requirements. Collaboration continuously taps the wisdom of all team members.

Polymer optics offer serious advantages in terms of their lightweight, low cost and high malleability. The key manufacturing techniques of injection molding or diamond turning ensure 100% repeatable levels of precision, levels difficult to achieve using more traditional glass solutions.

The measure of our skill as a custom optics manufacturer is ultimately the success of our customers. Browse to see examples of how Syntec adds value.

Optical Micro Lenses are often helpful with reducing weight & package size. The component reduction is obtainable with DFMA (assembly) features added to the lens design. Product examples include Imaging (Camera), Illumination, Scanning, Projection, Exploratory or Invasive optical products.

Syntec Optics offers deep expertise in both moldings opaque and optical polymers. For over ten years, we have been manufacturing complex custom optical components, such as plastic Plano prisms and additional plastic optics and combining them as required to form complete optoelectronic solutions.

Not all polymers are created equal. Also, each type has many grades that affect important characteristics such as flow, purity and environmental durability. Syntec combines and processes different types to achieve your unique goals, and regularly finds breakthroughs with broad applicability.

Tooling and optics tolerances are tightly linked since achieving the latter requires the former. We build all tooling in house, including molds to produce lenses as small as 0.5 mm, which requires tolerances of a quarter of a fringe. Tolerances, however, are significantly affected by the overall design and the choice of materials.

Optical Bandpass Filters are used to transmit selective wavelengths of the spectrum while attenuating all other wavelengths. Syntec Optics produces complex optical coatings on plastics. Bandpass filters on the glass are relatively straight forward to produce. Coating design on plastic substrates is complicated.

Syntec Optics has deep expertise in anti-reflective coatings. Anti-reflection coatings are used to reduce reflection, increase transmission and enhance the contrast of your optical systems suppressing residual reflection or eliminating ghost images.

Syntec Optics uses well-established principles to design, optimize and calculate the performance of optical coatings. An optical coating is one or more thin layers of material deposited on an optical component such as a lens or mirror, which alters the way in which the optic reflects and transmits light.

Syntec Optics has developed thin film technology for plastic optical systems. Thin film technology is a process by which very thin layers (nanometers in thickness) are deposited on a substrate. Electronic semiconductor devices and optical coatings are the main applications benefiting from thin film deposition.

Synchronizing assembly with your distribution needs is a critical factor in your program’s success. Whether you require one-time or ongoing optical assembly, Syntec Optics can offer a precision electro-optical assembly-line in a cleanroom environment, enabled by skilled technicians supervised by expert engineers.

We develop the best, most cost-effective solutions to today’s optical engineering challenges. These solutions may utilize some of the unique capabilities of plastic such as aspherical surfaces, diffractive surfaces and molded in mechanical features that promote alignment accuracy and economical assembly.

A Fresnel Lens is a lens that uses a series of annular rings of spherical lenses set at various angles to produce a lens with a very short focal length relative to its diameter. The Fresnel lens will also be much thinner (using less material) than its corresponding spherical lens.

Syntec Optics was commissioned to build a tool for a prism which would be used in an optoelectronic assembly. During the tool build, our customer decided to change the optical prescriptions of the aspheric surfaces. Such a change can delay the delivery of a tool by weeks.

Syntec Optics is your answer for reduced development time and optimum performance of your optical assembly project. Our optical alignment and assembly capabilities include applications like mounting, alignment, beam manipulation and focusing. Efficient optical systems require carefully matched components.

Customers engage Syntec Optics to conduct optical design development of LWIR lenses. An example is a request for the following specification: 25 mm EFL, f/1 and a FOV. The camera chip size is 640×512 with 17 μm pixels so the diagonal is 13.93 mm, which yields a nominal FOV of ±15.57°.

Customers engage Syntec Optics to conduct diffractive designs. Once the suitable material is determined, the first step of the design investigation is to design a single element. The design is optimized at a single wavelength and aspheric terms are added to both surfaces. The correction with up to 6th order aspheres is quite good.

Syntec develops many designs during its investigation process after the camera applications are reviewed. Material selection is key, germanium (Ge), which has almost twice the index of refraction compared to ZnS (i.e. 4 to 2.2). The two element Ge design provides significant improvement in imaging.

Many commercial LWIR lenses are currently two-element solutions.Diamond turning is a main component of the manufacturing requirements, although AR coatings are also a critical part of the process. Coating IR materials can be quite challenging and expensive because of the relatively thick layers that are required.

Precision molding of lenses using Chalcogenide glass affords considerably less expensive production cost in large quantities compared to SPDT (single point diamond turning) and a definitive and competitive price-performance ratio. Chalcogenide glass has attractive optical properties over broad IR spectrum.