COMPARISON OF ALGORITHMS FOR DETERMINING THE THICKNESS OF OPTICAL COATING LAYERS BASED ON THE MONOCHROMATIC MONITORING DATA

The reverse engineering problem of determining the layer thicknesses of deposited optical coatings from on-line monochromatic measurements is considered. To solve this inverse problem, non-local algorithms are proposed that use all the data accumulated during the deposition process. For the proposed algorithms, the accuracy of solving the inverse problem is compared in the presence of random and systematic errors. It is shown that in the case when the measured data contains only random errors, the best accuracy is provided by the algorithm based on minimizing the discrepancy functional. In the case of systematic errors, the advantage of one the algorithms based on minimizing the variance functionals is demonstrated. Key words: inverse problems, reverse engineering, optical coatings, thin films.