Precision glass molded optics are becoming increasingly popular. The technology has matured rapidly in the last decade and can now be found as a preferred manufacturing process in many applications ranging from diode collimation to fiber coupling, illumination, and imaging both in the visible and the infrared. Precision glass molding lends itself to high volume replication of glass optics, ranging from simple spherical to aspheric, freeform, array and wafer level optics. This course provides a detailed overview of precision glass molded optics. Course topics include glass properties, moldable glasses, preforms, molds and tooling, tooling materials, mold coating, processing, specialty manufacturing processes, molding machines, post-processing, and costing. The course also covers the design process, including tooling design, preform selection and sizing and a detailed overview of design for manufacturing for precision glass molding. This course is for those interested in a more thorough understanding of precision glass molding. Introductory material can be found in course SC1178: Fundamentals of Molded Optics.

This course provides attendees with an overview of the numerous optical molding technologies with an emphasis on the fundamentals of the more dominant fields of injection molded plastic optics and precision glass molding. A review of glass molding, plastic molding and hybrid molding processes will be included. The attendee will gain an understanding of how and when molded optics can be effectively used in products and how to select the correct manufacturing method. Course topics include description of the manufacturing processes, tool design features, materials properties, design methods unique to molded optical elements, manufacturing tolerances, coatings, test methods, and examples of applications that use optical elements.