The Boulder office hosts a world-class optical research, metrology, and fabrication laboratory. This lab allows us to rapidly prototype new product designs, characterize their performance, and feedback results to our design team for refinements in a short period of time. We also evaluate components from our manufacturing and supply partners to help streamline our products’ integration into manufacturing facilities and work to continually improve our consumer product lines.
In order to QC our manufactured micro-structure optics, we use a suite of microscopy tools. Standard white-light microscopes operate on larger features, but for our micro- and nano-scale designs, we depend on a Laser Scanning Microscope and Scanning Electron Microscope respectively. These microscopes help us ensure that our designs have been accurately reproduced by the tooling and molding processes at our manufacturers’ sites.
Our Liquid Crystal (LC) and Polarization lab has everything we need to fabricate custom LC devices and characterize their attributes. Central to this capability is an Axoscan tool that measures optical and polarization properties of LC cells and birefringent films.
We use a number of custom camera systems to study the quality and color of light emanating from and reflecting off of our displays. We fabricate fixtures to accurately hold our test samples and write the software to automate the data collection and analysis all inhouse. These tools provide us the feedback to improve our designs and manufacturing processes as well as compare and contrast with existing technologies.
