Optical and mechanical design, driven by manufacturability.
Most polymer-optic programs that fail late fail because the prescription assumed a glass surrogate that never had to negotiate with the press, the gate, or the AR stack. We design the part as the molding it becomes — and we design the mechanical that holds it against the thermal and vibration envelope it actually lives in.
Six families of optics and the mechanical that surrounds them.
- Imaging systems
- Visible, NIR, and SWIR imaging optics — lens prescriptions, tolerance budgets, and stray-light budgets that hold across the program's environmental envelope.
- Illumination optics
- Collimation, homogenization, and TIR collectors for laser, LED, and broadband sources. Co-designed with the assembly tolerance stack and the optical envelope at the target plane.
- Freeform and toric surfaces
- Non-rotationally symmetric optics for HUD, head-mounted displays, and aberration-corrected illuminators — designed for SPDT manufacturability and verifiable on our interferometer or profilometer.
- Hybrid refractive / diffractive lenses
- MOD lenses and DOE/refractive hybrids for achromatization, lightweighting, and structured-light shaping — see the diffractive-optics capability for the fabrication side.
- Optomechanical mounts and housings
- Datum-locked mounting strategies and housings that survive the program's thermal cycle, vibration profile, and assembly fixture sequence.
- Windows and covers
- Polymer cover lenses, sensor windows, and protective optics — AR-stack shift envelopes co-designed with the coating chamber and the substrate resin.
The simulation and analysis stack the design lives in.
- Zemax OpticStudio
- Primary sequential and non-sequential optical design.
- CODE V
- Legacy program support and customer-format prescription handling.
- LightTools
- Illumination, étendue, and homogenization modelling for non-imaging optics.
- FRED
- Non-sequential stray-light analysis with realistic surface scatter and coating data.
- SolidWorks + Siemens NX
- Mechanical CAD, optomechanical fixturing, and assembly tolerance modelling.
- Moldex3D + Autodesk Moldflow
- Mold-flow simulation for fiber orientation, residual stress, birefringence prediction, and gate placement.
- ANSYS
- Thermal and structural analysis for environmental cases — soak, gradient, vibration, and shock.
- Monte-Carlo tolerance & sensitivity
- Yield, MTF, and wavefront sensitivity to every dimension in the tolerance budget — driven from the prescription forward.
Four failure modes we predict and design around — before the prescription closes.
We model the part as a molding — gate, runner, weld lines, shrink, residual stress — before we finalise the prescription. Below: the recurring failure modes that surface late on polymer-optic programs, and what design does about them.
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Failure mode
Birefringence at the gate that the prescription never modeled.
What we do about it: mold-flow with residual-stress overlay runs in parallel with the optical prescription. Gating decisions are part of the lens design, not a post-tooling cleanup.
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Failure mode
Sink near thick sections that hides under the first-article CMM and shows up at the wavefront.
What we do about it: thickness audit at design freeze; ribbing or core-out solutions evaluated against the optical aperture so the dimensional release reflects what the optic actually does.
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Failure mode
Alignment shift from datum-to-optical-surface drift across thermal cycle.
What we do about it: datums tied directly to the optical axis at the design stage; tolerance stack-up covers cumulative shift across the spec'd thermal envelope, not just room-temperature CMM.
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Failure mode
AR-coating stress on thin webs and edges driving microcracking at thermal soak.
What we do about it: coated-substrate finite-element analysis in parallel with the optical design; web thickness and edge geometry adjusted before tool kickoff to keep the stack inside its adhesion envelope.
Six artefacts every design engagement produces.
- Drawing pack with separate optical and mechanical sheets — surface prescription on the optical side, GD&T tied to the optical axis on the mechanical side.
- Tolerance budget with Monte-Carlo yield against the program's wavefront, MTF, or stray-light KPIs.
- GD&T datums explicitly tied to optical performance — every dimension on the print earns its place against an optical line item.
- Mold-flow report with residual-stress overlay across the clear aperture; gate, vent, and ejector placement decisions documented.
- Prototype plan — SPDT, short-run, or full-cavity sample — sized to the program's risk tolerance and time budget.
- Validation plan: wavefront, MTF, environmental cycle, and assembly-stack verification, sequenced against PPAP, DHF, or program milestones.
Related capabilities
- manufacture Polymer Injection Molding Six all-electric presses, ISO Class 8 cleanroom, closed-loop hold and pack on every cavity.
- finish Metrology & Testing Interferometry, profilometry, spectrophotometry, MTF, and environmental — every part has a number behind it.
- manufacture Single Point Diamond Turning Moore Nanotech 350FG and 250UPL — prototypes, freeform surfaces, and mold-insert finishing in one bay.
Send us your concept — we'll come back with a manufacturability read.
One page on the optical envelope and the program constraints is enough. We will tell you whether the design lives inside the press and the stack, or whether it needs revision before tool steel is committed.