Welcome to the OIC2025 Design Contest

The design problems for OIC 2025 involve a Design for Production challenge (Problem A) and an Immersed, Polarizing Notch Filter challenge (Problem B).

From the very first OIC Design Challenge there have been two types of design challenges that were very different from one another. This year there will be a common theme, where each challenge will require the designer to fabricate their designs using a virtual monitoring system, and compare the results to the theoretical design.

A web-based evaluation program and tools will be provided for problems A and B. The evaluation program allows the user to calculate merit functions for these problems to ensure calculations done at home will match the calculations done by the challenge judges. In addition to providing merit functions, the website will contain links to relevant target and example design data, and provide a “Virtual Deposition Process” and a “Virtual Spectrophotometer” for problems A and B.2. Please report any problems or questions to the evaluation team at design.contest@clearapertures.com

Please Select a Problem From the tab at left

Downloads - Data and Documents

• The most recent probelm description can be found here:
  https://www.optica.org/events/topical_meetings/optical_interference_coatings/program_topics/contests/
  Note that while every effort is made to keep the problem description consistent with this website, information found on this website superceeds information in the design challenge document. The website is the authoritative source.
• The design targets for problem A can be found here:
  http://clearapertures.com/Neuschwanstein_target.csv
  
• The example design for problem A can be found here:
  http://clearapertures.com/TrubetA21.txt
  
• The 68-layer example design for problem B can be found here:
  http://clearapertures.com/ProblemBExampleDesign.txt
  

Note: This software is a work in progress. Calculations are validated as accurate. 
Aesthetic changes, qol additions, or bugfixes may appear over time.

   Last Update: 12/09/2024.
      03/04/2025 - Problem B1 no longer throws an exception when reading an invalid monitoring wavelength.
      12/09/2024 - Error message for thin dielectrics incorrectly listed 2nm limit instead of 5nm. Limit remains 5nm, evaluation not chenged.
      11/23/2024 - Fixed problem B calculations. H is now n=2.25, not n=2.2.
      10/23/2024 - Fixed parse error on problem A. Example design added.
      10/18/2024 - Problem B reference design available for download. B.2 deposition speed set to 50A/s.
      10/16/2024 - Initial release.