The FMW-20 provides turnkey Tunable Laser Source (TLS) measurements of thin-film components. The system combines fast power meter technology from dBM Optics with lasers made by New Focus, Agilent, or Nettest.
Filters are manually loaded into a cassette holding 100 or more pieces, and the loaded cassette is placed into the workstation. The workstation automatically steps from filter to filter, corrects the optical alignment at each position, and records a transmission or insertion loss spectrum via a commercial optical spectrum analyzer. Measurement beam sizes can be anywhere between 50 μm and 500 μm, within a working area of 100 by 100 mm.
Control, data acquisition and data display is provided by a local PC workstation running under Windows 2000. A custom Windows-32 application manages to motion control, oversees auto alignment, acquires raw scan data, and analyzes the raw data to extract the important filter characteristics. Extensive data for every part examined, including the raw data if desired, is stored in a relational database. This database can be local to the workstation, or a company-wide SQL database that supports ODBC access. User-written programs can retrieve scan data, apply more sophisticated analysis algorithms, and add classification information back to the database.
