OpticStudio's native RCWA algorithm enables the company to boost productivity to stay competitive in a fast-moving market.

China-based Vivo designs and develops consumer telecommunication devices and related technologies, including smartphones, smartphone accessories, software, and online services.

The customers for Vivo's products are continuously seeking new features and improvements that give them the latest and greatest applications of optics technologies, including diffractive optical elements, or DOEs, which utilize the wave characteristics of light to achieve new levels of functionality, performance, and miniaturization for camera lenses, as well as for augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) equipment. Designs that include DOE require diffractive optics simulation capabilities that go beyond those for traditional geometric optics.

To achieve these DOE capabilities, Vivo wrote macros and other code that implemented the new simulation types needed for testing and tolerancing the DOE-based designs. Along the way, the company remained mindful of the ongoing need to achieve the levels of miniaturization and performance their customers expected. To achieve the time-to-market goals required for keeping up a competitive advantage, Vivo wanted a highly reliable way of doing this work more quickly.

Using the native support for rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) introduced in the January 2020 release of OpticStudio 20.1, Vivo saved time with their DOE-based optical simulations and analyses, replacing the need to write and test macros for each new DOE optical design. "RCWA support, along with other diffractive optics features in OpticStudio, gave us the advantage of speed without sacrificing the accuracy of our results," said Deqing Kong, Optical Engineer at Vivo. "Many of the latest technologies in our industry are related to DOE, so choosing Zemax was important to us for gaining these capabilities."

For Vivo, the results of using OpticStudio are not just faster—they're also more accurate. "We trust the data we get from Zemax," said Kong. "Aberration calculation results are more accurate than we've seen in other software. And the modular user interface makes OpticStudio very easy to use."

Read the full story to find out how RCWA and other OpticStudio features enabled success at Vivo. And to learn more about OpticStudio, the industry standard for optical design software, try it for free!