Optical Design Software for today's applications

The scope of optical design has increased tremendously in the past few years. To meet new requirements, optical design software today goes far beyond traditional lens design. Consider a few examples:

• Laser beam optics must be designed to avoid ghost images strong enough to explode lenses.
• Optical lithographic systems must achieve nanometer distortion tolerances.
• Home entertainment centers connect to fiber communications systems that require optical design.
• Non-imaging illumination systems are now being designed using computers instead of laboratory mockups.

New coherent and incoherent sources, high-speed modulators and detectors, deterministic fabrication methods, and powerful computers have created both opportunities and demands for optics in high technology. Today's optical systems are integrated with electronics, mechanics, and image-processing software. Performance-based evaluation methods, such as modulation transfer function analysis, are increasingly used to determine technological tradeoffs.

OSLO is a single program that provides the scope needed to meet today's requirements. You don't need to get several different optics programs — OSLO combines advanced ray tracing, analysis, and optimization methods in a software environment that lets you complete a wide variety of tasks in contemporary optical design.

OSLO's software technology not only leads the optics industry, it also sets standards to be met by other new software applications. OSLO's CCL produces compiled byte-code commands automatically to achieve high performance. Originally called pseudo-code in the early days of computing, this approach to software development has achieved a renaissance in the past ten years. Instead of a proprietary Basic language or a macro system based on command sequences, CCL uses a virtual machine to seamlessly execute a mix of C-compatible code with user-defined and built-in library functions, giving you both high performance and open source code.

A complete list of optical systems for today's applications would require hundreds of entries, but a few of the design tasks that have been handled by OSLO are listed in the following table.

Imaging Systems	Non-Imaging Systems	Laser Systems	Visual Systems
System Layout Lens Design Laboratory Instruments Optical Testing Astronomical Telescopes	Illumination Systems Solar Collectors Faceted Reflectors Condensers Light Concentrators	Fiber Couplers Laser Focusing Scanners Cavity Design Beam Delivery	Microscopes Telescopes Low Vision Aids Virtual Reality Night Vision

To see examples of some of these systems, go to OSLO Highlights. For more discussion of CCL, go to CCL Highlights. The OSLO capabilities are generally described in the contents list for this section, but if you have a specific question you should contact Sinclair Optics using the message form.

OSLO is available in several versions, both paid and free, as described in the contents list to the left. Again, if you have a specific question, please use the message form.