Reflections on 45th Anniversary of CODE V

CODE V Developed By Tom Harris

The origins of CODE V started long before its first commercial release on August 1, 1975. Tom Harris, the founder of Optical Research Associates (ORA®) and a University of Rochester Institute of Optics alumnus, was very interested in the potential of automated optical design while at his first job at Bell and Howell Company in Chicago in the 1950’s. Tom helped program accounting machines to do ray tracing, and participated in the transition from plug boards to programming using machine language, programming using assembly language, and finally programming in FORTRAN –a very “modern” language at the time. In 1963, Tom founded ORA as an engineering services company in Pasadena, California. The precursor to CODE V served essentially as “in-house” software to support the ORA engineering business. Tom and his first “Associate,” Darryl Gustafson, would design by day and program by night!

As the reputation of ORA’s software spread, designers from other companies would come to the ORA facility in Pasadena and lease time with the program. This not only included local designers, but designers from Chicago, Japan, and elsewhere. In 1975, the software was packaged with a minicomputer as a turnkey system, and CODE V as a standalone product was born. It may come as a surprise that CODE V is an acronym for Computer-aided Optical Design and Evaluation Version “5”. In 1982, CODE V Version 6.95 was released. This was the first version of CODE V that I used as an optical designer with Texas Instruments in 1982. A photo of the user manual is shown below:

One of Tom’s great early insights was to base CODE V’s optimization error function on image quality components only, and use a separate method to solve for constraints exactly. Even today, this is one of the key strengths of the CODE V local optimizer. CODE V was the first (and sometimes only) commercial optical design software to introduce many features and capabilities, including:

• Zoom lens optimization (1975)
• Fast MTF tolerancing (1978)
• Partial coherence analysis (1980)
• Interactive Tolerancing & Automatic System Alignment (1986)
• Non-sequential surface ray tracing (1988)
• MTF optimization (1991)
• Global optimization (1992)
• Astigmatic light sources (1995)
• Fiber coupling efficiency analysis (1996)
• Generalized Beam Propagation (1999)
• Fiber coupling efficiency optimization & tolerancing (2001)
• Integrated scalar diffraction efficiency (2005)
• Microlithographic critical dimension analysis and tolerancing (2007)
• Mid-spatial frequency surface error modeling (2009)
• Asphere Expert and Glass Expert Tools (2011)
• Effective tolerance desensitization in optimization (2012)
• Step optimization for improved convergence (2013)
• Image Simulation for hyper-hemispherical fields of view (2014)
• The SpecBuilder Interface (2018)

And many more features, too numerous to list.