The Process Exporter plays your coating back one layer at a time — the spectrum after layer 1 is finished, after layer 2, and so on to the complete design — so you can see exactly what the in-chamber spectrophotometer will measure as the stack grows. It also exports per-step .res deposition files that deposition-monitoring software can load directly, one file per layer.

A timeline at the bottom scrubs through the deposition. The chart shows the bare-substrate baseline (dotted), one finished-spectrum curve per layer (graded from blue for the first layer to red for the last), and the live curve at the current scrub position (bold). The spectrum is computed with the full system (front, substrate, and back, with an incoherent substrate), so it matches what the spectrometer would really see.

Settings

The top toolbar holds the setup; the left sidebar lists the deposition sequence and per-material rates.

Active side — which coating is being deposited, front or back.

Opposite-surface state — whether the other surface is bare or already coated for the whole run.

Quantity — measure reflectance, transmittance, or absorptance.

Angle of incidence and polarization — the standard analysis controls (s, p, or average).

Spectral range — the wavelength start, end, and step for the interactive chart. A coarse step keeps scrubbing responsive.

Export step — the wavelength step written into the .res files; set it to match your spectrophotometer’s grid (for example 0.4375 nm).

Show step curves — toggle the per-layer finished-spectrum overlays.

Deposition rates — an optional per-material rate (nm/s) in the sidebar. Rates only shape the time axis of the timeline; they do not change the spectrum. The sequence table shows each layer’s thickness and time, with the current layer highlighted. Your setup choices and rates are remembered between sessions.

Save — pick an output folder; one .res file is written per completed deposition step (01.res, 02.res, …). Each file carries a header and a per-layer table of physical and optical thickness; layers are numbered in deposition order, with layer 1 being the first deposited (the one touching the substrate).

How to read it

Play or scrub the timeline to watch the spectrum evolve toward the final design. The step curves let you see at a glance how each layer moves the spectrum, which is useful for spotting a layer whose contribution is small (and therefore hard to monitor) or one that swings the spectrum sharply. The .res files are the deliverable for your deposition controller: they describe the target spectrum at the end of every layer so the monitor can compare the live measurement against the intended one. The live spectrum uses the design’s nominal materials with no noise; for a realistic as-built prediction use the Broadband or Mono monitoring simulators instead.

References

• H. A. Macleod, Thin-Film Optical Filters, 5th ed., §2.6.4 (incoherent substrate).