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Considering manufacture from the design starting line
Jessica Rowbury looks at how Zemax is advancing conventional virtual design with a new feature for high- volume manufacturing
O
ptical design software is an essential part of any engineer’s toolkit, allowing users to improve the efficiency and performance
of their systems. But when it comes to considering how manufacturing will affect these designs, traditionally this requires a separate follow-on step. Not only does this take additional time, but it could result in designs that are more sensitive to manufacturing and assembly errors. For high volume applications, where the slightest defect can impact yields, this could increase costs and waste valuable resources.
Zemax has launched a new capability in OpticStudio that aims to solve this problem, without requiring any additional knowledge or computing power. The High-Yield Optimization feature – available in OpticStudio Professional and Premium subscription licenses – builds in manufacturing parameters from the very beginning, rather than as a post- design tolerancing step. This results in designs that are less sensitive to defects that happen during manufacturing and assembly. Engineers can now design with greater confidence and with greater design flexibility, knowing that their creations will meet the required specifications once built. ‘The important part for optical designers and companies they work for is how the physical product works. This is a combination of not just the CAD-designed performance of a perfect system, but that performance plus the impact of the errors you know are going to happen through
20 Electro Optics October 2019
manufacturing, assembly and other sources. It’s important to be able to target not just the first stage in the process – the CAD perfect design – but that all the way through the process you’re optimising and improving the performance of what will be the real finished product,’ said Chris Normanshire, technical content manager at Zemax.
High-volume and high spec Zemax’s High-Yield Optimization will advance design for a broad range of applications, but is particularly targeted at high-volume industries such as consumer electronics, or industries with tight design specifications, such as medical and defence. Components designed using this software feature can range from mobile phone lenses and microscopy components to wide-angle imaging lenses for automotive camera systems. It also works with different wavelengths, such as the visible and near-infrared. ‘The feature doesn’t favour one type of design over another, it doesn’t make any assumptions. There is no need for any additional knowledge, it’s something that
“With the High-Yield Optimization feature it is possible to factor in manufacturing errors at the same time as optimising the output performance”
anyone can start incorporating into their design process,’ Normanshire remarked. Using a simple example of how a photographic objective is designed through simulation software, the purpose is to try and produce the sharpest image possible. Optical design software is used to test how the quality of the image changes – the output – depending on the parameters of the lenses, mirrors, or the optical components. ‘Previously, we were always looking at
solely the output – just how good that image might be,’ explained Normanshire. Now, with the High-Yield Optimization feature, it is possible to factor in manufacturing errors at the same time as optimising the output performance, which significantly improves the overall performance of the system. ‘Each lens you make is not going to be
exactly how you designed it, because it’s impossible to manufacture the perfect lens. It might be slightly too thick, the shape might be slightly wrong. When it’s assembled, the positions of the elements might change a little bit. All of those things will combine to degrade the performance of the system you’ve built,’ explained Normanshire. ‘The overall performance is composed of those errors, plus your nominal system. During tolerancing [the software] computes how manufacturing and assembly errors affect the performance of the system – and how sensitive a design is to those errors.’ By combining the two steps that have
traditionally been carried out separately, the designer gets the ‘best of both worlds’, Normanshire added. ‘They will get a good
@electrooptics |
www.electrooptics.com
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