FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 22, 2020

Latest release enables optical engineers to make optical products more manufacturable and to create cutting-edge freeform designs.

KIRKLAND, WASHINGTON—Zemax announced the latest release of their flagship software, OpticStudio. In 2020, Zemax will have three OpticStudio releases, the first in January followed by a May and September release. Throughout the year, these releases will provide significant advances in optical manufacturability, tolerancing, freeform design and more. OpticStudio 20.1 starts the year by delivering new functionality in tolerancing, freeform design and customer requested features.

“With OpticStudio 20.1, we are thrilled to bring new functionality that will help our users bring their products to market faster.” said, Dr. S. Subbiah, Chief Executive Officer of Zemax. “We see enormous opportunity for both our new and long-time users to improve their tolerancing workflows and to create and optimize cutting-edge freeform designs. This release is a great start to a series of releases focused on aiding our users to build better products more efficiently, while reducing their manufacturing costs.”

New Tolerancing Functionality
OpticStudio 20.1 helps designers get quick results with real tolerances. Available on all tiers, Quick Sensitivity provides early insights into the performance of optical systems by quickly checking how designs are affected by manufacturing errors. In addition, the new Tolerance Presets in the Tolerance Wizard allows users to easily set up their system for a tolerance analysis by delivering realistic default tolerances that reflect manufacturing industry standards.

Cutting-edge Freeform Design
With the introduction of TrueFreeForm™, an industry-first freeform design capability, optical designers can create and optimize lenses of any shape and are no longer limited by conventional parametric freeform methods. This release includes other freeform advancements like off-axis support for surface data analyses, slope analysis and operand, and a faster Zernike calculation. With these additions, users can easily optimize freeforms to fit manufacturing constraints and analyze the most common freeform systems.

Customer Requested Functionality
Several enhancements have been added to accurately model volume holograms as well as surface-relief gratings according to Kogelnik’s and the RCWA methods. Correctly simulating these diffractive optical elements enables computation of the diffraction efficiency which gives realistic results when running ray traces or Image Simulations.

Feature Experiments
Users will also notice that this OpticStudio 20.1 includes a couple of new feature experiments. These feature experiments are a preview to some of the features planned for our next release in May. We encourage users to try out these features and share their feedback with us.

About Zemax
Zemax’s industry-leading optical product design and simulation software, OpticStudio®, OpticsBuilder™, and OpticsViewer™, helps optical, mechanical, and manufacturing engineering teams turn their ideas into reality. Standardizing on Zemax software reduces design iterations and repeated prototypes, speeding time to market and reducing development costs. Acquired by EQT Partners in 2018, Zemax is headquartered in the Kirkland, Washington, area and has offices in the UK, Japan, Taiwan, and China.

For more information: www.Zemax.com

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