Top 10 CODE V Optical Design Tips

Tip No. 1:

Get clarity on requirements as early as possible in the design process.

Having a clear goal for the work, the requirements for the design, and the required timeline ensures that you can plan adequately with other engineering and systems designers responsible for various aspects of the project. Also, a willingness to have some flexibility can help you succeed, as well! Unforeseen challenges for mechanical and packaging constraints, changing performance needs, or changing cost targets may necessitate a need for a new approach.  Having flexibility will be one of the tools that enables you to be a successful designer!  Once you have the clear requirements, using the SpecBuilder in CODE V optical design software is a great way to track them:

Tip No. 4:

Make good use of CODE V’s excellent implementation of Lagrange (exact) constraints.

The Lagrange constraints serve to build a fence to keep the optimizer away from areas in solution space, where the design forms won’t satisfy these very important exact constraints.  CODE V has an excellent methodology for handling these constraints during optimization that will serve you well in your optical design work.

Tip No. 5:

Use ray grid spacing, or the DEL command, to adjust optimization ray grid settings for system specific design needs.

A useful tool for looking at the ray grid spacing is a CODE V supplied macro autogrid.seq, or autogridgq.seq, for rectilinear or Gaussian quadrature ray grid inputs for Automatic Design.

Tip No. 6:

Another best practice is to add some constraints early in the design process to desensitize your system design against fabrication and assembly errors (tolerance desensitization).

This allows CODE V to find forms that are least impacted by these types of manufacturing errors.  The most popular methods include using the sensitivity as-built (SAB) error function or the SN2 general sensitivity constraint. The SAB error function is a separate contribution to the overall error function, representing system sensitivity to as-built performance.  The SN2 constraints can be applied on each of the optical surfaces in your design to reduce the individual surface sensitivities.

Tip No. 7:

When using the sensitivity as-built error function (SAB), reuse the ray grid along with wavefront optimization to speed the optimization run.

Tip No. 9:

Try to incorporate constraints for the packaging early in the design process.

Using imported CAD for visualization can be a great assistance for this task in your work:

Tip No. 10:

Last but absolutely not least, communicate with your vendor – early and often in the design process!