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LightTools version 2024.03, now available, provides an array of innovative features and enhancements tailored to improve the user experience and advance the software's overall performance. Ranging from illumination system optimization enhancements to sequence ray tracing – an innovative simulation mode for even faster analysis of stray light paths – the new features in LightTools 2024.03 can streamline the delivery of your next illumination optical product.
Illumination Optimization Enhancements Speed Design Development
LightTools 2024.03 introduces an innovative global optimization engine designed to help users explore a broader solution space. This is a new method that supplements the capabilities of the local optimization engines available in previous releases. Global optimization is particularly beneficial when the starting design parameters are uncertain. This new engine can take a poorly defined starting point and transform it into a reasonable design, getting you closer to a good starting point for local optimization and speeding design development.
Another efficiency enhancement provided for both optimization and tolerancing is a command capability that enables you to insert commands at different phases in these processes. This feature allows you to perform custom steps at specific points in an optimization or tolerance analysis – adjusting weights or increments, saving intermediate values or results, or even integrating an optimization cycle in a tolerancing process, for example.
Environmental Effects Integrated for Analysis
On the simulation front, LightTools 2024.03 provides environmental analysis capabilities to account for variations for the index of refraction, which enables you to transfer environmental effects modeled in CODE V to LightTools in an optical system (.osf) file. This feature is especially useful for assessing performance shifts in cameras, AR/VR devices, and high-altitude or space-borne systems due to temperature and pressure changes.
Usability Improvements
The addition of grid expressions to the parametric controls is a significant improvement for usability in LightTools 2024.03 . This feature allows you to create a data table using a series of equations, input this data in parametric expressions, and pick it up for geometry, optimization, or anywhere tabular data is required for a simulation. This flexibility in defining distributions makes calculations more efficient and the design process more streamlined.
Surface Sequence Ray Tracing
Sequence Ray Tracing is a cutting-edge simulation method that accelerates the analysis of stray light paths by focusing on specific surface intersections. This capability is essential for design challenges that rely on specifying paths to trace, such as stray light analysis. This feature acts as a filter for the Monte Carlo ray trace method, truncating extra ray segments that do not follow the prescribed paths. As a result, it dramatically reduces memory usage and overall simulation time.
Simulation of a single path allowing improved sampling at the receiver
Thin Film Improvements
LightTools 2024.03 brings significant improvements in the design, modification, and tolerancing of multilayer coatings (thin film stacks). You can adjust the layer thicknesses, add and remove layers, add and change materials, and more. These enhancements simplify the workflow for the overall image analysis solution, making it an indispensable tool for imaging system designers who use thin films on lenses.
LightTools MetaOptic Design
The new LightTools MetaOptic Design Add-On allows you to design and characterize gratings using the RSoft Photonic Device Tools. It leverages the proprietary bi-directional scattering distribution function (BSDF) formulation provided by the RSoft Photonic Device Tools and benefits from the interpolation techniques between simulated angles to get accurate behavior simulations of gratings with the rest of the illumination system. This feature reduces the complexity of setting up and analyzing an AR/VR system, which saves time.
AR/VR design employing grating couplers that vary over a waveguide.
You can now use grating data simulated in RSoft Photonic Device Tools.
This eliminates the need to split a grating over multiple property zones.
Expanded API Documentation
LightTools 2024.03 includes expanded API documentation with syntax examples for C#, Python, MATLAB, and C++, significantly enhancing its accessibility for various users.
Conclusion
With its new features and improvements, LightTools 2024.03 expands important software functionality and enhances the user experience, ensuring a more streamlined and accurate design process. This version is an indispensable tool for every illumination optics designer.