Systematic Errors

Systematic errors in measurement data may be caused by various factors, for example:

  • signal drifts in the registration circuits of spectrophotometric devices;
  • inaccurate calibration of monitoring devices;
  • vacuum shift;
  • inaccuracy of tooling factors for witness glass.

These factors may result in the shift of measured transmittance/reflectance data as a whole or in the scaling them by a factor that differs from 1.

From a mathematical point of view, in the course of Systematic errors procedure only two unknown parameters are searched for. Optical coating model in this case can be described by vector \(X\):

\[X=d_1+\Delta_H, d_2+\Delta_L,…,d_m+\Delta_H(L)\]

optical characterization Fitting before and after application of systematic errors model (put the mouse on and out of picture)
systematic errors layer thicknesses Discrepancy function is optimized with respect to systematic shifts \(\Delta_H, \Delta_L\):

\[ DF^2(\Delta_H, \Delta_L)\rightarrow \min\]

  • OptiRE allows you to represent any errors as a sum of systematic errors and pure random errors with average value with respect to any layer material equal to zero (Normalize Errors);
  • Correction factors present systematic components of the ratios of actual thicknesses to theoretical ones (useful for adjusting the deposition process)
errors in layer thicknesses
post-production characterization The results of the procedure are presented as Relative, Absolute errors or correction factors for layers of active materials.

Systematic errors procedure can be easily run from an external software with the help of COM Automation tool.

Look our video examples

Look our video examples at YouTube

OptiLayer videos are available here:
Overview of Design/Analysis options of OptiLayer and overview of Characterization/Reverse Engineering options.

The videos were presented at the joint Agilent/OptiLayer webinar.