RF magnetron sputtering deposition of multilayers optical filters for ultra-broadband applications with a large number of thin layers

Abstract

We present recent achievement on manufacturing optical filter and multilayers done with two complementary RF magnetron sputtering approaches: deposition duration control and in situ optical reflectance monitoring. Those approaches were greatly improved thanks to ellipsometry and spectrophotometry cross-studies of optical refractive indexes of Nb2O5, TiO2 and SiO2 materials grown using two sputtering systems. At the same time, we conducted deposition studies of these three materials which have increased the manufacturing reliability and allowed us to consider developing complex optical multilayers with more than 100 layers.