aai2k/TFStudio
An open-source design and optimization environment for optical thin-film coatings - aai2k/TFStudio
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README
An open-source design, analysis, and optimization environment for optical thin-film coatings.
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What is TFStudio? TFStudio is a professional desktop application for designing and analyzing optical thin-film coatings — antireflection coatings, mirrors, beamsplitters, bandpass and edge filters, and more. It combines a rigorous, double-precision optical engine with modern refinement and synthesis algorithms and a full analysis suite, in a docked, multi-window interface.
⚠️ Status: TFStudio is independently developed software. Always verify critical designs against your own calculations and measurements before committing them to a production deposition run.
Key features Design & evaluation
Transfer-matrix method (TMM) for absorbing and dispersive media at oblique incidence, both s- and p-polarization Full-system modeling: front coating, substrate (with absorption), and back coating, including incoherent substrate multiple reflections Reflectance / transmittance / absorptance spectra, color, integral figures of merit Layer editor with simultaneous physical / optical / quarter-wave / full-wave thickness representations
Optimization & synthesis
Damped least-squares / Levenberg-Marquardt refinement with an analytic Jacobian Additional refiners: Newton, Newton-CG, SQP, conjugate-gradient, differential evolution, simulated annealing Needle optimization and gradual evolution synthesis (automatic layer insertion from scratch) Structural optimization over the layer count itself Flexible merit function: spectral targets, ramps, band averages, worst-case operands, thickness constraints Multi-threaded via a Web Worker pool; hot kernels accelerated with WebAssembly (SIMD)
Analysis windows
Optical evaluation, admittance diagrams, electric-field profiles, group delay / GDD, ellipsometric parameters, color evaluation, refractive-index profile Tolerance & manufacturing analysis: Monte-Carlo error analysis, layer sensitivity, inhomogeneity, roughness/scattering, systematic deviations
Materials
Built-in library generated from the refractiveindex.info database (CC0) Sellmeier / Cauchy / tabulated dispersion; complex index with explicit conventions Import of external catalogs and an in-app refractiveindex.info browser
Manufacturing
Deposition / monitoring simulation (broadband and monochromatic optical monitoring) Process exporter and optical-coating data interchange (including Zemax OpticStudio coating export/import)
Platform
Cross-platform desktop app (Electron + React, pure JavaScript) Built-in help/documentation, English and Russian UI
Scientific basis TFStudio implements established thin-film optics, citing primary sources:
Transfer-matrix method — H. A. Macleod, Thin-Film Optical Filters, 5th ed. Numerical needle synthesis — Sullivan & Dobrowolski, Appl. Opt. 35, 5484 (1996); Tikhonravov et al., Appl. Opt. 35, 5493 (1996) Gradual evolution — Tikhonravov et al. (2007)
All computations use double precision. The TMM engine agrees with independent reference calculations to within single-digit parts-per-million for validated test cases. The transfer-matrix engine is published separately as tmmcore, so its accuracy can be checked without installing TFStudio: two commands reproduce agreement with an independently written implementation to 8.6e-14. See its validation page. Installation Download (recommended) Grab the latest build for your platform from the Releases page. Windows — TFStudio Setup <ver>.exe installs normally; TFStudio-<ver>-Portable.exe is a single executable that needs no installation, for locked-down deposition PCs. Separate Windows 7/8.1 builds are published alongside. Linux — TFStudio-<ver>-x86_64.AppImage, made executable and run: chmod +x TFStudio-*-x86_64.AppImage ./TFStudio-*-x86_64.AppImage AppImages need FUSE 2, which Ubuntu 22.04 and later no longer install by default. Either add it (sudo apt install libfuse2), run the AppImage with --appimage-extract-and-run, or use the TFStudio-<ver>-x64.tar.gz archive, which unpacks and runs with no such dependency. Want to try it first? Run the live web demo — example designs and live spectra, right in the browser, no install. Build from source Requires Node.js 18+ and git. git clone https://github.com/aai2k/TFStudio.git cd TFStudio npm install npm start # launch the app The WebAssembly transfer-matrix kernel arrives prebuilt with the tmmcore dependency, so no Emscripten toolchain is needed and source builds get the same performance as the released binaries. npm run build checks out the refractiveindex.info database submodule and installs the docs-site dependencies automatically. The database is large; to pull it upfront instead of on first build, clone with --recursive. Other useful scripts: npm test # run the test suite npm run docs:install # install docs-site deps (needed before docs:dev) npm run docs:dev # preview the documentation site npm run build # package a distributable (electron-builder) Packaging releases build-release.ps1 provisions everything a fresh clone needs and packages the installers in one step. It asks which optional targets to include; pass the flags to answer up front. npm run dist # Windows 10/11 installer + portable npm run dist -- -Win7 # ...and the Windows 7/8.1 builds npm run dist -- -Linux # ...and the Linux AppImage + tar.gz The Linux artifacts are produced by build-release-linux.sh, which the release script drives through WSL; it also runs on any Linux host directly. It needs a distribution with Node.js 18+ and rsync, and builds in the Linux filesystem rather than in place, so a Windows checkout keeps its Windows node_modules. After packaging it launches the unpacked application under Xvfb as a smoke test, which is skipped with a message if Xvfb is not installed. macOS builds require a macOS host and are not currently published. User documentation is hosted at docs.tfstudio.xyz, is built into the app (Help menu), and its source lives in docs-site/. Citing TFStudio If TFStudio contributes to your work, please cite it. Citation metadata is in CITATION.cff; GitHub renders a "Cite this repository" button from it. Contributing Issues and pull requests are welcome. Because TFStudio is a scientific tool, contributions to the optical engine are held to a physics-correctness bar (cite your sources, validate against a reference, add a test). Please read CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a pull request. By contributing you agree that your contributions are licensed under the project's MIT license. License MIT © 2026 Andrey Achapovsky Author Andrey Achapovsky — ORCID 0009-0005-1497-6279 Acknowledgements
Material data derived from the refractiveindex.info database (CC0, public domain). Built with Electron, React, Plotly.js, and KaTeX.