ZEMAX Users' Knowledge Base

Michael Pate

Mr. Michael Pate is the President of Optical Short Course International an education and technical consulting firm. Michael has been developing and teaching optical courses worldwide to Fortune 500 companies for the last 9 years. His visually oriented teaching style is backed up with clear, non-complicated explanations of difficult technical subjects and concepts. These instruction techniques combined with his interactive style and some humor, enable clients to leap up the complex learning curve of optical engineering subjects. He holds a Masters Degree in Optical Sciences from The Optical Science Center at The University of Arizona, and an Executive MBA from the University of California, Irvine. Michael has 21 years of optical engineering experience in new product development of optical instruments, R&D, optical system design, optical manufacturing, optical component and system testing, optical alignment, thin films, and radiometric design and analysis. Most recently he has been doing illumination design consulting work on digital projectors, LED illumination systems, medical optics, developing short courses, and teaching illumination design at University of Arizona. He holds 10 patents and has about 25 pending patents.

 Articles by this Author

How to Model Thermal Gradients in an Interferometer Cavity

This article shows how to model a linear thermal gradient in a double-pass system. The method can be easily extended to more complex gradients.

How to Make Any Object into a Source Object

This article describes how to create sources of any geometrical size and shape.  The Source Object provides the flexibility to convert any object into a source, including any imported CAD object.

Polarization Conversion Systems for Digital Projectors

LCD and LCoS spatial light modulators must have linearly polarized light to work properly. However most light sources for digital projectors produce unpolarized light, rather than losing 50% of the optical power of the lamp, a polarization conversion system (PCS) can be used to produce nearly perflectly polarized light. This article describes how PCS systems work, how they are modeled in ZEMAX, and how they are integrated into digital projectors.

Fly's Eye Arrays for Uniform Illumination in Digital Projector Optics

This article discusses the design issues involved in designing fly's eye spatial light integrators, with specific application to the design of digital projectors.

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