Automotive Lighting Design: How Synopsys Enhances Workflows

As a partner with Dassault Systèmes, Synopsys is continually enhancing its LucidShape CAA V5 Based product to facilitate the development of safer, smarter vehicles within the CATIA V5 environment. CATIA V5 users can rely on LucidShape CAA to reduce automotive lighting design time, efficiently explore creative styling options, and deliver timely, accurate results to manufacturing teams.

As we described in our blog post on designing automotive lighting systems, the need to meet regulations–while also delivering unique styling–has increased optical system complexity. Because of this, automotive designers benefit more than ever from advanced design software to help them meet demanding product and industry specifications.

Synopsys is continually enhancing LucidShape CAA’s modeling of part-level models and product-level assemblies for greater efficiency and productivity. Read on to learn about the latest features in LucidShape CAA that can improve your design workflows.

Expanded Advanced Analysis

LucidShape CAA Advanced Analysis provides access to a wide range of tools that save hours of engineering. It establishes a framework that enables you to consolidate many individual analysis steps into a single analysis process. You can create, apply, save, and re-apply this process to evolving datasets throughout the design process, thereby automating repetitive analysis tasks. Advanced Analysis also simplifies one-off type interactive analyses that are encountered during the optical design process when exploring or troubleshooting an optical design.

The latest enhancements to Advanced Analysis help you further accelerate analysis workflows.

For example, an expanded, customizable Measurement Data Grid provides more information and gives you more tools for your analysis. If you want to test a light distribution against multiple sets of measurements and requirements, you can do so by creating additional sets (or tabs) of measurements, all in one window for easy reference and comparison.

A new re-aim capability provides additional analyses to help designers evaluate whether headlamp designs meet regulations such as the U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 108, which allow a 1/4° re-aim for any direction at any test point. LucidShape CAA reports point measurements for Nominal, Re-aim Min and Re-aim Max values.

LucidShape CAA also provides dozens of new measurements so that you can now import over a thousand regulation test tables from the library. This helps you to develop custom test tables based on specific project requirements. You can also import and export test tables to communicate and share data between design teams and vendors.

Dynamic Surface Filter

Optical designs often require analysis of ray paths or photometry for individual optical surfaces or a set of optical surfaces. These simulations are computationally expensive, particularly for signal lighting applications. The new Dynamic Surface Filter in LucidShape CAA allows you to perform the analysis without re-running simulations to significantly reduce computation and analysis time.

License Plate Sensor

Use LucidShape CAA to simulate license plate illumination systems with the License Plate Sensor. The easy-to-use interface allows you to choose from over two dozen license plate types for your simulation, such as Economic Commission for Europe (ECE), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), and China GB. You can validate design compliance with regulations using Advanced Analysis; specific measure functions and test tables are provided for this task.

MacroFocal Enhancements

LucidShape CAA’s MacroFocal feature for the design of multifaceted reflectors includes freeform design capabilities to provide more granular control over light spread to maximize flux collection. This gives designers the freedom to focus on styling aspects, rather than the implementation details of complex optical components.

The MacroFocal freeform design feature offers multiple options for defining the target light distribution. In addition, MacroFocal now includes an optional die-pull direction option that aligns the connection surfaces between facets to a defined angle, allowing for easy extraction of the injection molding reflector from the cast.

Light Guide Design Module Enhancements

Light guides continue to be an important part of automotive lighting systems, particularly for instrument panels and exterior lighting.

The LucidShape CAA Light Guide Design Module accelerates the design of light guides by helping designers automatically optimize angular and spatial light distributions for best performance. One of the latest updates to the Light Guide Design Module is an automatic scaling feature for intensity distributions. This allows you to quickly determine the source flux needed for intensity distributions to meet specifications. In addition, the scale value gives you a direct way to compare the efficiency of design variations.

The Light Guide Design Module comes with an expanded set of example models – such as daytime running lights – that walk you through all the features and help jumpstart your design project.

Get Started Today

If you already use LucidShape CAA V5 Based, download version 2022.06 from Synopsys SolvNetPlus or contact your local LucidShape distributor.

If you are not yet using LucidShape CAA, contact us for a demo and trial license.

Visit our LucidShape products page that offers information about our entire family of automotive lighting design and visualization tools.