Quality Assurance

Balboa Scientific's key strengths are in optical modeling, test & measurement, which are absolutely necessary in order to verify product quality.  Our in-house metrology laboratory is capable of measuring key properties and parameters of optical components such as transmission & reflection from 200nm to 20um, mechanical dimensions, surface accuracy, surface quality, flatness, parallelism, squareness, angle, centering, MTF, focal length and radius of curvature. 

Our inventory of equipment includes a Zygo GPI 6-inch aperture interferometer equipped with a vast assortment of transmission flats, transmission spheres, reference flats and reference spheres, Nikon 6D and Moller-Wedel autocollimators, Trioptics OptiSpheric-OptiCentric lens measurement system, Nikon & Vision Engineering coordinate-measuring microscopes, nodal slide MTF lens bench, and a huge assortment of different lasers, light sources and test fixtures for performing customer-specified functional tests on optical components.

Spectral measurements on coated optical samples are performed during Q/A at each of our affiliated coating labs.  We also routinely perform spectral reflection & transmission measurements on the actual optical parts themselves in our laboratory, using our Ocean Optics, StellarNet, Nicolet and Buck Scientific spectrometers.

Optical designs are analyzed and compared using Zemax optical design software, which is also used to generate ISO 10110 toleranced mechanical drawings of optical components.  Optical coatings are modeled using TFCalc software.