IRD specializes in the manufacture of optical and industrial glass components made from a wide range of raw materials. We excel at holding very precise tolerances to help our customers solve problems resulting from excessive variation. Due to our customer intimate solutions, we have become the sole-source provider to large and small corporations in the machine vision, sensors, medical, pressure transducer, defense, aerospace, and process industries among others.

Optics

Many different types of high grade optical materials are used to make the optical components at IRD. Many of the components require custom coatings designed to improve optical performance, including mirrors, durable anti-reflection, band-pass filters, and other specialty coatings. Some of the high quality materials used at IRD include n-Bk-7, B270, high index glasses, Schott filter glass, fused silica, quartz, 33 expansion borosilicate (Pyrex and others), Zerodur, and ULE.

Cylindrical

We currently manufacture cylindrical lenses in many shapes and sizes: rod lens, convex radii, and concave radii from radii less than 4mm to those greater than 125 mm radii. Customized centering equipment is used to accurately locate the center of curvature along with custom ripple checking equipment to ensure the form and flatness of the curve is acceptable.

Spherical

In 2004, we acquired the capability to manufacture very precise spherical optics in the full range of sizes, from micro-optic lenses up to 6" diameter. Our personnel at the Blaine, MN facility currently manufacture spherical optics, doublets, achromats, and complex optical assemblies.

Flat

We manufacture mirrors; prisms of all types; precision, certified optical wedges; lighting wedges; flats and windows for many custom applications. Flatness is controlled using a combination of interferometers, precision gauging and regular equipment maintenance. Flatness of 1/10 wave and better is achieved regularly, along with parallelism of .000030" over a 9"+ substrate. Parts with angular tolerances better than 3 arc-minutes are provided to customers with NIST traceable certificates accurate to within 5 arc seconds for the optical angle. IRD also works with pattern masking and chrome on glass reticles on a regular basis.

Additional Services

More value added services for the optics industry are available, including optical assemblies and high quality custom optical coatings.

Industrial Glass

IRD manufactures many different sizes and shapes of non-optical components using many varied and unique grinding techniques to hold precise dimensional tolerances and surface finish requirements.

Tubes, Pedestals, and Rods

IRD currently manufactures many different sizes of tubes and pedestals for the pressure transducer sensor industry and other applications. The pedestals are precision ground on CNC Lathes, with the ends lapped and polished to better than .000004" flat on the ends. The tubes, produced in volumes approaching ½ million per year, are controlled to tight length tolerances, polished on the ends to better than .000004" flat, and fire polished on one end, while maintaining a very tight scratch and dig tolerance. We also manufacture precise rods, used primarily as tooling, spacers or masks in precision applications.

Tooling

We manufacture many varied shaped of polishing tools using optical grade glass in sizes ranging form 20" wedges to 8" sunflowers to ¼" flats. Several customers purchase diffusing and transmissive inspection stages from us, including stages with grooves and through holes for vacuum applications. Ultra-precise spacers are made from special low expansion materials such as Schott Zerodur, ULE and ceramics. Glass and ceramic tooling components are manufactured on a variety of grinding equipment, including CNC Mills; CNC saws/dicing machines, and surface grinders, while going through a series of in-process control inspections on any of several systems, to include an OGP vision system and a tool-makers microscope.

Flat Substrates

IRD makes precision substrates with a variety of surface finishes ranging for rough ground (20 uin Ra) to lapped (4-8 uin Ra) to polished (better than 1 uin Ra). Substrates are available from many different materials, including Zerodur, nBk-7, nSK-5, Pyrex, ceramic, and many other specialty materials (optical and non-optical). We hold tight flatness, parallelism, and other dimensional tolerances daily for the ring laser gyro applications in the defense and aerospace industries, as well as tight surface finish requirements for bonding applications in the circuit board testing arena.