Custom Optical Design Services with Expert Engineering

We use industry-leading optical design programs including ZEMAX®, CODE V®, and OSLO® for optical design, combined with SOLIDWORKS®, AutoCAD®, and PTC Creo® for mechanical design integration. Custom optical design is not the act of generating an ideal optical prescription. It is the process of defining optical performance that can be manufactured, assembled, coated, and maintained over time within real system constraints. A design is only successful when performance survives fabrication, tolerances are achievable and stable, materials behave as expected over environment and time, and the system performs predictably in use. Design that ignores these factors is theoretical — not deployable.

Yes, our capabilities range from one-of-a-kind prototypes to high-volume production runs of hundreds of thousands per month, with scalable manufacturing processes. Most optical designs do not fail mathematically. They fail because tolerances are allocated without sensitivity analysis, materials are chosen for convenience not behavior, surface requirements are unrealistic for the fabrication method, coatings are added late and treated as finishes, and scale-up effects are ignored. Custom optical design must start from system reality, not idealized assumptions.

We work with various optical materials including acrylic, Zeonex, Zeonor, Ultem, styrene, as well as metals like nickel, brass, copper, and aluminum for diamond turning applications. In real systems, optical performance is influenced by material properties and variability, fabrication method and surface texture, alignment sensitivity, coating behavior, and thermal and mechanical environment. Custom optical design must balance these factors intentionally. Optimizing one metric in isolation often degrades overall system performance.

Yes, we offer independent design verification of existing optical designs, including simulation, optimization, and prototype testing to ensure specifications are met before production. Effective custom optical design treats tolerances as performance tools, not safety margins. That means identifying which dimensions actually affect performance, allocating tight tolerances only where sensitivity demands it, and relaxing constraints elsewhere to improve yield and stability. Over-constraining designs increases cost and risk without improving outcomes.

We provide comprehensive thin-film coating services including anti-reflective, mirror, filter, and beamsplitter coatings for UV, visible, and NIR ranges on both plastic and glass substrates. Materials are not interchangeable. Material choice affects transmission and dispersion, thermal expansion and stress, dimensional stability over time, coating compatibility, and environmental durability. Custom optical design must treat materials as dynamic system elements, not static catalog entries.

Our single-point diamond turning achieves better than 13 Å RMS surface finish in nickel and typically 60-80 Å RMS surface finish with < ½ wave peak-to-valley surface figure in polymers. Different fabrication methods introduce fundamentally different behaviors. Design must account for whether optics will be injection molded, diamond turned, machined or replicated, or hybrid fabricated. Each method affects achievable surface quality, mid-spatial frequency content, repeatability at scale, and cost and yield. Designing without committing to a realistic fabrication path is a common source of late-stage redesign.

We operate under ISO, FDA, and GMP protocols with comprehensive in-house metrology capabilities including interferometry and coordinate measurement systems. Coatings are not post-processing steps. They affect optical performance, surface stress, environmental durability, and thermal behavior. Custom optical design must include coating behavior early — especially when working with polymers, SPDT surfaces, or wide angular distributions.

Project timelines vary based on complexity, but our integrated design and manufacturing capabilities allow us to significantly accelerate time-to-market compared to traditional multi-vendor approaches. Optical designs must survive temperature cycling, mechanical stress or vibration, and long service lifetimes. Performance at room temperature on a bench is rarely the limiting condition. Custom optical design must consider how performance drifts over time and environment. A design that works once is not finished. Custom optical design must consider process capability at volume, tolerance stack-up across assemblies, variation between production lots, and long-term process drift. Many programs fail during scale-up because production reality was never treated as a design constraint.

Rather than asking 'Can this be designed?', experienced teams ask: What fabrication method actually supports this geometry? Which tolerances truly matter? How sensitive is performance to variation? What changes when we scale? How will this behave over time? Those questions define whether a design is viable — not just clever.

Custom optical design succeeds when performance targets are grounded in reality, materials and fabrication are chosen deliberately, tolerances are tied to sensitivity, coatings and environment are included early, and scale and lifecycle behavior are addressed. Design that stops at simulation is incomplete.