Latest release enables optical engineers to make designs more manufacturable 

OpticStudio offers everything you need to design optical systems and the latest release includes a significant advance in capability to enable optical engineers to design better products faster and reduce waste during manufacturing.

OpticStudio 19.8 includes High-Yield Optimization, a new capability that enables engineers to optimize for the best as-built performance so higher manufacturing yields can be produced at a reduced cost. 

“We are excited about the significant new capability OpticStudio 19.8 brings to our customers” said, Dr. S. Subbiah, Chief Operating Officer of Zemax. “We see tremendous opportunity for our users to reduce their manufacturing costs and to improve the accuracy of their optical systems. This release shows that Zemax is committed to leading the optics community forward through new capabilities and continuous innovation.”

Available in OpticStudio Professional and Premium subscription licenses, High-Yield Optimization is beneficial in industries such as consumer electronics where companies need to design for a high manufacturing yield and medical and defense industries that need to meet tight design specifications.

Make designs more manufacturable with High-Yield Optimization

Conventional optimization, where computing the sensitivity to optical tolerances is costly and time consuming, maximizes the optical system for its nominal performance. This methodology can result in designs that perform well but are very sensitive to manufacturing and alignment errors—leading to waste and part rejection during the manufacturing phase.

High-Yield Optimization solves this problem. This new optimization method innovated at Zemax uses the angles of incidence as a proxy for the actual tolerances which vastly speeds up the numerical optimization. By optimizing simultaneously on these ray angles and the image quality, the optimization process produces designs with good “real world” performance—rather than just having good performance in a computer simulation—and delivers designs that are less sensitive to manufacturing / alignment errors.

This results in designs that meet tight specifications, have improved manufacturing yield, and have lower manufacturing costs through less waste.

Additional new functionalities in OpticStudio 19.8 

Available for all license types:

• SMIA-TV distortion calculation, which allows users who use SMIA-TV distortion as a metric for evaluation to much more easily see the distortion in their system inside of OpticStudio.

• Field Data Editor improvements in order to simplify the process of varying and setting solves on fields.

• Optimization Wizard Improvements: Distortion can now be controlled in the Default Merit Function.

For a complete list of features and enhancements in the latest release, check out the OpticStudio 19.8 Release Notes.