Mar 5 2008
JDSU announced today it has reached a milestone in the manufacture of Linear Variable Filters (LVF). With this milestone comes the promise of substantial cost-savings and a radical improvement in the state of manufacturing such filters in scale: JDSU's highly precise and refined manufacturing geometry will double the productivity of LVF creation and provide a reduction in cost by a factor of two.
The advance is a particular boon for manufacturers of process control instrumentation and devices for commodity goods, enabling them to roll out new products in large quantities at a cost-effective rate.
JDSU's LVFs -- very compact and robust devices -- deliver advanced technology efficiencies, give vast amounts of immediate spectral feedback, and are integral to multispectral and hyperspectral sensing applications used in process control and sensing applications.
LVFs are ideally suited for use in compact, non-dispersive instruments where high-resolution measurements of a spectrum are involved or where information is desired at a number of wavelengths of a specific spectrum.
Currently, in order to get a multispectral reading, companies must have a grating, which can have quality and durability limitations, or a filter wheel, which requires multiple and varied band pass filters in a mechanical assembly. Because of their robustness, the LVFs are well-suited for use in adverse environments such as industrial, military, and aerospace applications.
With JDSU's progress in the manufacturing process, LVFs will be:
- Cost-effectively manufacturable in high and low volumes;
- Dimensionally customizable
- Spectrally matched to detector arrays
- Less apt to fail, because they have fewer moving parts; and
- More productive at a reduced cost, enabling users to get the maximum amount of data possible.
"In the automotive industry, regarding the use of LVF's for a variety of measurement applications, we are seeing traction in applications such as testing car exhaust, and fuel optimization," said Barry Weitzenberg, general manager of JDSU's Advanced Optical Technologies, Custom Optics Product Group. "Until now, many companies had to limit the amount of data measurement points they could have due to cost constraints, but JDSU's breakthrough is opening up new opportunities to them. They are now able to gather more data that can be applied towards product design, testing new market solutions, and other enhancements."