LEDs, have surpassed incandescent light sources in recent years for most applications. Benefits of the LED include compact size, high power efficiency, and a long lifespan. LEDs also have undesirable qualities that optical engineers must address, such as the need for color mixing and collimation....
Read MoreLight Emitting Diodes, or LEDs, have surpassed incandescent light sources in recent years for most applications. Benefits of the LED include compact size, high power efficiency, and a long lifespan [1]. LEDs also have undesirable qualities that optical engineers must address, such as the need...
Read MoreFRED has the capability to simulate polarization of rays through an optical system. Light sources can be randomly, circularly, or linearly polarized. Optical components that filter or manipulate polarization, such as birefringent wave plates and polarizers, can be accurately modeled. One simple example of polarization...
Read MoreWhen FRED is installed on a computer for the first time, the default preference settings will not be optimized to leverage the resources available on the machine. Rather, the default preference settings are deliberately chosen for program stability. This knowledge base article discusses the various...
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The term minimalism is also used to describe a trend in design and architecture where in the subject is reduced to its necessary elements. Minimalist design has been highly influenced by Japanese traditional design and architecture. In addition, the work of De Stijl artists is...
Read MoreCoherent sources are represented in FRED using a superposition of Gaussian beamlets. The ray grid spacing of the source is used to determine the waist and divergence of the beamlets. To properly model coherent propagation properties, the beamlets must remain Gaussian and perform best when...
Read MoreOptical models of the human eye are used for designing ophthalmic devices and optical systems meant to be used with human eyes. This knowledge base article demonstrates one such model: the Arizona Eye Model, which is described in the SPIE “Field Guide to Visual and...
Read MoreIn analyzing results from simulations involving polychromatic sources and dispersive elements, it may be of interest to examine the power reaching a detector as a function of wavelength. The script associated with this article can be used to generate such a data set after a...
Read MoreThis article contains a generic script for reading the contents of an existing Amplitude/Phase Mask applied to a Detailed Source, which can be helpful in debugging and verification. In this script, dialogs prompt the user for a file name where data is to be stored...
Read MoreFRED can express the power of its sources in either radiometric (Watts) or photometric (Lumens) units. This article discusses the methodology behind this feature. Radiometric vs. Photometric Sources...
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