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ENGINEERING: OPTICS


Optics software focuses on power, convenience


The principles of optics are well known, and a variety of software for optical engineering is widely available. Paul Schreier investigates what these suppliers are doing to make their software even speedier and more powerful


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hether providing support for multicore systems or improved interfaces to popular CAD packages,


manufacturers of optical engineering software are taking advantage of the latest technology to offer their users improved performance. On the CAD interface front, there are


two basic approaches for optics programs: those that integrate CAD capabilities into the optics software, and those that take the reverse approach and integrate their optics capabilities into popular CAD packages. Taking the former approach, Breault Research Organisation has released its APEX optical engineering software, the first part of a multi-phase, multi-year plan to create a concurrent engineering software environment. APEX is a standalone application that combines the firm’s ASAP non-sequential ray-tracing engine along with the SolidWorks 3D modelling environment. With APEX, users get the feature set in the ‘SolidWorks Parts, Assemblies, and Drawings’ package supplied to software integrators and value-added resellers such as Breault. This combination enables the design and analysis of complex optical and illumination systems with a simple workflow; optical designers learn, create, design and analyse in the same program environment. ‘Other programs have been launched as plug-ins for SolidWorks, but none have gone fully embedded as we have,’ says marketing director Michael Stevenson. ‘With the fusion of SolidWorks and our optical engineering software, APEX offers optical


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designers and their engineering colleagues a unified software environment where there is no need to translate, bridge or link between two separate programs.’ As for the opposite approach – integrating


optics into CAD packages, thus making optics an integral part of an enterprise-wide CAD solution – users have a wider selection of CAD environments with which to work. A prime example comes from OPTIS. Its products have been fully integrated within major CAD platforms since 2003, including CATIA V5, SolidWorks and Pro/ ENGINEER. This integration is claimed to


accelerate the design process – typically by 65 per cent. The company says that conventional optics software is merely ‘interoperable’ with CAD programs, requiring designers to ping- pong between parameters and rendering, and to import and export complex vector field distributions, which corrupts data. With OPTIS’ single-data model, data transfer is seamless and users needn’t rebuild an optical model with every iteration, which is where 80 per cent of design time is usually spent. The firm’s SPEOS package is a standalone application where users don’t need a CAD program to make it work, because it has its own geometric modeller. It’s the original flagship solution from OPTIS, but it is slowly being replaced as companies move towards the CAD-integrated versions of SPEOS: OptisWorks (which integrates within SolidWorks), SPEOS CAAV5 BASED (within CATIA V5), and now SPEOS for Pro/Engineer (within Pro/Engineer).


APEX from Breault Research Organization combines the power of optics with integrated SolidWorks functionality


SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD DECEMBER 2010/JANUARY 2011 www.scientific-computing.com


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