Global Partners: Former Soviet Bloc

During the cold war era, the Soviet Bloc developed truly impressive optics capabilities, usually finding ways to keep-up with the West at a fraction of the cost. With little or no access to western optical materials, manufacturing equipment or metrology tools, the Soviet optics industry was forced to develop almost everything from scratch. Specialized materials were “re-invented,” such as “Sital” zero-expansion glass, from which many of the world’s astronomical telescope mirrors are made. Also developed by the Soviets was a tremendous variety of specialty optical glasses, UV and IR grade fused silica, and all of the standard infrared materials such as Sapphire, BaF₂, CaF₂, GaAs, Ge, KBr, KCl, NaCl, Si, ZnSe; whose properties and quality rival those of their western counterparts.

Today, Balboa Scientific’s customers benefit from this legacy in many ways. The optics industry in the countries of the former Soviet Union and former Eastern Bloc is still highly vertically integrated: capable of making the raw materials, manufacturing equipment, finished coated optics and metrology tools. These countries still enjoy a low cost structure combined with an extremely skilled optics workforce; a combination that is optimum for producing small batches of high-precision, specialty optical components.