Fraunhofer Institut für Angewandte Optik und Feinmechanik
The Fraunhofer IOF
The Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering (Fraunhofer IOF) designs and develops optical and precision engineering processes, modules, equipment and systems.
The institute focuses in particular on optical coatings, microoptics and integrated optical systems, precision engineering component arrays and systems, and noncontact shape measurement and surface characterization.
Core competencies
Optical design expertise, the institute's core field of competence, provides the basis for all its developmental work. The institute combines its broad experience and knowledge in all its activities around this area, whether in classical optical systems, microoptics and integrated optical systems, unconventional optics solutions and complex stray and scattered light analyses, or in optical coating and optomechanical systems.
Precise solutions are developed to meet each problem and client's wish, ranging from more general solutions and complete developmental work with tolerance analyses to redesigning and concrete construction recommendations and plans.
Our scientists and engineers use a wide spectrum of commercial and adapted design programs in addition to their own instruments, including the necessary material and component parameter databanks.
Our equipment
Since 2002, the Institute has been located in a modern new building on the Beutenberg Campus in Jena, Germany, which is located in close proximity to other research facilities as well as Jena's Friedrich Schiller University and University of Applied Sciences (Fachhochschule). Institute employees conduct their research under excellent working conditions covering approx. 5000 m? (over 50,000 sq. ft.) of laboratory and office area.
The laboratory equipment meets the highest of standards. In addition to standard high-tech structuring systems (photo- and laser lithography, reactive ion etching), the facility is equipped with coating technology (evaporation, sputtering, PE-CVD, polymer coating), surface metrology (stray light, optical and mechanical profilometry, AFM, REM) and special optical metrology (interferometry, structured light, waveguide metrology, refractive index profilometry) as well as electrical and mechanical measuring stations (materials testing, dimensional and surface metrology).
The facility infrastructure also includes an excellently equipped construction department, highly efficient experimentation stations for mechanics and optics and a microtechnology applications center (amt). The Application Center for Microtechnology Jena has been established to transfer R&D results into marketable technologies and products.
The amt offers:
- Realization of microcomponents and systems
- Expertise in the conception and realization of Microsystems
- Microtechnical manufacturing, assembly and measuring equipment for external users
- Support in introducing products to the market; Education and/or additional training based on specific needs
Our clients
Our clients come from every industrial sector including the fields of precision engineering and optics, machine and vehicle manufacturing, communications and information technology, environmental and security technology, glass and ceramics production and medical technology. We work just as successfully at home with small and middle-sized enterprises as with major companies. We are also suppliers to the public sector, cooperating both with national project sponsors (federal and state governments and research sponsor programs) and with the European Union.
Our employees
Our core staff includes physicists, chemists and engineers with both university and industrial experience.
Nearly 100 employees currently hold positions at Fraunhofer IOF in addition to around 80 temporary employees & students and scientific assistants.
The Fraunhofer IOF core staff is, however, also continuously changing. Its young emerging scientists come not only from the nearby Friedrich Schiller University and from throughout Germany, but from other countries as well such as France, Sweden, Russia and Ukraine, thus providing an excellent basis for flexibility and innovation with an international perspective.
