Reliability, Accuracy, Performance

Pre-Tested and Pre-Approved
One of ORA’s most important strengths is the synergy between our engineering services and software development efforts. Our engineers provide ideas, guidance, testing, and feedback for the development of LightTools. You can be confident that, before using the latest version of LightTools to solve your engineering challenges, the software has been “put through its paces” by a dedicated team of engineers who work at the cutting-edge of optical technology.

Accurately Simulate As-Built Performance 
Some products claim to offer faster ray tracing, but are actually tessellating surfaces to create an impression that their ray tracing is faster. This can be very dangerous to the engineer. LightTools traces rays to real surfaces. This is more accurate than tracing to tessellated geometry (or spline patches) because of potentially large deviations from the tessellated surfaces in the local slope. The result can cause rays to refract or reflect at the incorrect angle. A deviation in local slope of a fraction of a degree is large enough to give accuracy errors of 10-20%.

LightTools tells you when enough rays have been traced. Statistical accuracies of each receiver bin is reported in an easy to read matrix. You can copy and paste this data to other applications for post processing or to incorporate into a report.

Receiver output data easily viewable and copy/paste capable

LightTools illumination design software is a 3D solid modeler with specialized optical features and “optical accuracy.” When designing or machining a mechanical part, accuracy within 20 microns may be sufficient. However, when tracing the path of light rays through an optical system, specification of the surface shapes and intersections to optical accuracy (a fraction of the wavelength of light) is necessary. Unlike some Mechanical and Optical CAD programs, surface shapes in LightTools are defined with parametric formula (not tessellated approximations), which facilitate the maintaining of surface shape, position, and intersection to optical accuracy for all calculations. This optical accuracy ensures that the LightTools model performs, as the real system will. Illumination analysis is performed using state-of-the-art Monte Carlo techniques to help insure accurate simulation of light effects. The user has control over the simulation to modify the receiver properties such as the number of bins and symmetry calculations to affect the simulation error estimate. Millions of rays can be traced for the Monte Carlo simulation for high precision applications such as microlithography systems.

Correct Results - Fast
LightTools has a variety of automated techniques based on surface type for quickly tracing rays through your optical system. In addition, you have several controls for faster convergence of the LightTools simulation. These include source ray aiming, source starting media, importance sampling of scattering surfaces, ray splitting by probability distribution, choice of simulation random number generator, and the amount and type of data saved in RAM (or not) at the receiver.

Multi-CPU Support
LightTools can make full use of hardware configurations involving multiple CPUs, or single CPUs with hyperthreading or dual core architecture. The LightTools multi-CPU capability supports up to 8 processors in a single PC, and is available at no extra cost.