An open-source design, analysis, and optimization environment for optical thin-film coatings.
Website · Tutorials · Live demo · Documentation · Download
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.
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
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.
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.AppImageAppImages 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.
Requires Node.js 18+ and git.
git clone https://github.com/aai2k/TFStudio.git
cd TFStudio
npm install
npm start # launch the appThe 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)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.gzThe 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/.
If TFStudio contributes to your work, please cite it. Citation metadata is in CITATION.cff; GitHub renders a "Cite this repository" button from it.
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.
MIT © 2026 Andrey Achapovsky
Andrey Achapovsky — ORCID 0009-0005-1497-6279
- Material data derived from the refractiveindex.info database (CC0, public domain).
- Built with Electron, React, Plotly.js, and KaTeX.