Calendar
SPIE Photonics West 2009
Jan. 24-29, 2009
Booth 615
San Jose, California
Visit SPIE Web site
SPIE Defense, Security, & Sensing
April 14-16, 2009
Booth 1037
Orlando, Florida
Visit SPIE Web site
Introduction to CODE V
April 27-May 1, 2009
Pasadena, California
See details or enroll
Advanced Topics in CODE V
May 4-8, 2009
Pasadena, California
See details or enroll
For a complete list of CODE V events worldwide, visit our Web site:
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Quick Tip - When to Use an Aspheric Element
It is well known among optical designers that aspheric surface shapes can be used to greatly improve performance or to simplify optical designs (i.e., reduce the number of required elements for a given level of aberration correction). However, in the past, the benefit of using aspherics had to be weighed against the extra cost for fabrication and testing. Today, new manufacturing and testing technologies have reduced the production costs of aspherics considerably. While the use of aspherics is more cost-effective than ever before, the optical designer is still faced with the problem of determining which surface or surfaces in the design should be aspherized to maximize the performance benefit.
One technique is to use a global optimization method such as CODE V’s Global Synthesis. With this method, you convert all the air-glass interfaces into aspheric surfaces with variable aspheric coefficients, and run the global optimizer. The best resulting designs are then inspected to determine which aspheric surfaces show the most departure from a best fit sphere. Often, these surfaces can be left as aspheric, the other surfaces converted back to spheres and the system re-optimized locally.
A new macro from ORA Tech Support, find_best_asphere.seq, offers another approach that is particularly useful if you are limited to a single asphere. The macro steps through the surfaces of your lens one at a time, converting each surface in turn to a conic or asphere, and reoptimizes each one-asphere system. You can restrict the range of surfaces to be tried, if you like. The optimizations utilize an optimization sequence(.SEQ file) that you must supply. The macro lists the resulting error functions for all the optimized systems, which are saved (as .SEQ files) so you can analyze and compare them later. More details on using this macro can be found in the comments in the macro header. Find_best_asphere.seq is currently available for download from ORA’s Customer Service Web site, www.oraservice.com , under CODE V Support > Macros and User-defined Feature Downloads > Macros from Tech Support.
CODE V 10.0 Coming Soon
CODE V version 10.0 will be shipped to all current users this month. This major update includes:
- Parallel processing support for local and global optimization on PCs with multiple processors.
- A new Beam Synthesis Propagation (BSP) feature that uses a highly accurate beamlet-based method for diffraction based beam propagation.
- Support of Windows Vista Business 32 and 64.
- New System Data and Surface Properties buttons added to the Lens Data Manager GUI for quicker access to these windows.
- French and German language support for CODE V’s user interface.
- Support of up to 999 variables during optimization.
For more information on these and other enhancements included in CODE V version 10.0, you can download a copy of the CODE V 10.0 Release Notes from ORA’s Customer Service Web site, www.oraservice.com.
Updates to the Customer Area of the Web
The following updates have been made to the ORA Customer Service Web site, www.oraservice.com, under CODE V Support:
- A new training recording, Overview of Tolerancing in CODE V, is available under Webinar Recordings and Demos. This 45 minute video gives an overview of CODE V’s tolerancing capability including its fast ray based tolerancing feature (TOR), interactive tolerancing, user-defined tolerancing, and Monte Carlo tolerancing.
- A new macro, find_best_asphere.seq, that identifies the best surface in a lens to convert to an asphere for optimal performance, has been added under Macros and User-defined Feature Downloads > Macros from Tech Support.
- CODE V 10.0 Release Notes, summarizing the enhancements in version 10.0, are available for download under Release Notes. A separate document on the new Beam Synthesis Propagation (BSP) feature is also available.
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