Jan 31 2011
Vice President of Product and Business Development at Navitar, a leading supplier of optical components, Craig Fitzgerald said that the company’s clients are extending into short-wave infrared (SWIR) and near infrared (NIR) bands.
The images captured with lenses developed for infrared wavelengths enables the users to detect some flaws on solar wafers or semiconductors, which are not possible with visible light, he added.
Fitzgerald continued that cameras are developed with more sensitivity towards nonvisible wavelengths of light mainly because of the advancements in CMOS silicon sensors. Sensor producers are equipped to maximize the sensitivity of their equipment for particular UV or IR wavelengths. and certain customers also want lenses optimized for those wavelengths, he continued.
Edmund Optics’s Product Line Manager, Nicholas James stated that the SWIR band could detect the low-effectiveness and high-effectiveness regions in solar cells. Certain lenses marketed are actually visible lens with a SWIR optical coating to enhance the frequency of transmission, he added. He further said that developing exclusively for SWIR band enables the lens producer to offer better contrast. The camera sensors utilized in that band are larger with larger sized pixels than sensors utilized in the visible band, he added.
Source: http://navitar.com