A manager’s four-step guide to buying optical product

eGuide for engineering management

A manager’s four-step guide to buying optical product design and simulation software

1 Zemax eGuide: A manager’s four-step guide to buying optical product design and simulation software

The right software is more than just the algorithms it’s built on. When it comes to choosing optical product design and simulation software for your team, don’t compromise performance with software that isn’t comprehensive enough to meet your needs. It goes without saying that optical product design and simulation solutions must offer accurate tolerancing and optimization tools for optical design and mechanical packaging—as well as a modern user interface with a complete API. More than that, it must accelerate design validation

to maximize the productivity of your engineers. Finally, beyond the technical capabilities of the software itself, it’s critical to choose a solution partner that offers valuable training and ongoing support to help drive your innovation and go-to-market efforts. Your technical reputation depends on it.

Here are four recommended steps to buying optical product design and simulation software.

Industry spotlight: Virtual reality and augmented reality Solving stray-light problems in AR/VR headsets is critical to their success. You can design a VR headset with a large field of view and minimize stray light in OpticStudio, then use LensMechanix to design mechanical components around the optics and evaluate the impact on overall system performance. Read the eGuide >

Zemax eGuide: A manager’s four-step guide to buying optical product design and simulation software 2

STEP 1:

Determine your primary business goalsMany product design team members have technical backgrounds and tend to approach problems with an engineering mindset. Engineers are trained to identify and resolve problems, and every detail is important. This mindset can make the process of determining which optical design software to buy very daunting. So, we recommend that you take a step back, and start by identifying your primary business goals.

Managers across industries—whether they work in astronomy, biomedical, augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR), or autonomous vehicles—consistently have the same goal for their optical product development teams: get to market in the least amount of time, at the lowest cost. Beyond that, think about your more specific objectives.

What’s the business concern that keeps you up at night?Are you:

• Driving toward a working physical prototype to secure a contract?

• Feeling the competitive pressure to reduce the cost of your product?

• Dealing with rapidly changing consumer or marketplace demands?

• Concerned about ensuring adherence to safety standards?

Getting alignment on your specific goals can help you pinpoint the right software to support growth and improve profitability.

Industry spotlight: Astronomy You can design and analyze stray light in a segmented space telescope in OpticStudio. Zemax software was used to build critical systems for the James Webb Space Telescope. Read the customer story >


STEP 2:

Apply the three requirements To help your team bring optical product ideas to fruition, the design software must encompass optical design of the mirrors or lenses, mechanical design of the housing for the optical system, and simulation of the product’s performance when the two designs are combined. The right software will model the entire optomechanical system, including the optics and the mechanical housing, because these designs cannot be reliably completed in isolation. If the full optomechanical system is not simulated in software, problems will most likely be caught during physical prototyping—or worse, during manufacturing—where the cost of design changes is high. Your product’s success depends on meeting three fundamental requirements for effective optical product design and simulation software.

While many optical design software companies claim that they support virtual prototyping, Zemax Virtual Prototyping is the only software solution on the market that allows you to simulate the entire optomechanical product.


Requirement 1: The software must maximize the productivity of your engineers.

Due to the specialized skills required for optical product design, most companies have siloed engineering teams. Optical engineers design optics in their preferred design software. Mechanical engineers design the components that house the optics in a separate CAD platform. This segmented design approach can make communication across teams difficult, often resulting in bottlenecks and tedious or repeated tasks.

The right software bridges this gap. It allows specialized teams to maintain design fidelity between file handoffs and across optical design software and CAD platforms. All

the optical system data should be retained throughout the design process, with carefully selected optical design parameters exposed in the CAD environment. This eliminates the need for approximations and assumptions, as well as manual rebuilds of design geometry.

Do your engineers complain about receiving too many emails and being stuck in too many meetings? You want them to be able to focus on solving the hard problems—not sending clarification emails and hosting meetings to troubleshoot file conversions. Software that uses the same file formats and retains the same critical pieces of information maximizes your engineers’ productivity. This saves time and reduces the overhead costs per project.

An OpticStudio stray light simulation in non-sequential mode for a camera phone

Requirement 2: The software must accelerate design validation.

The right design software enables engineers to catch and correct design errors early when changes are less costly. The ideal solution enables you to simulate the performance of the system at every stage of the design process, resolving errors before moving to the physical prototyping stage. Finally, it also enables engineers to design simpler systems, that meet the right specifications, but with lower manufacturing costs.

For example, with Zemax Virtual Prototyping, LensMechanix® brings the power of OpticStudio® ray tracing straight to the mechanical CAD package so that mechanical, product, and systems engineers can ensure the quality of the optical performance early and often throughout the entire design cycle. Errors can be corrected in the virtual prototype, where troubleshooting is significantly easier and changes are more cost effective, rather than in the physical prototype.

Your optical software should include both sequential and non-sequential ray tracing capabilities. Sequential ray tracing is ideal for fast optical analysis and design,

while non-sequential ray tracing is required to simulate the interaction between all optical and mechanical components of the system. OpticStudio is the only commercially available software that provides the full functionality of both ray tracing modes. After you optimize, analyze, and tolerance an optical system in sequential mode in OpticStudio, you can convert it to non-sequential mode to check for back reflections, optimize for uniformity, or analyze the color appearance. In addition, non-sequential ray tracing can accurately simulate mounts, baffles, iris apertures, and other CAD parts designed in LensMechanix.

Zemax Virtual Prototyping enables teams to design for manufacturability. For example, the Cost Estimator feature in OpticStudio allows you to send lens data to manufacturers and get real-time cost estimates. Optical designers can see the cost impact of lens shape, size, material, coatings, quality, and quantity to make informed decisions. LensMechanix also displays optical tolerances, so that mechanical designers can make informed design decisions and consider manufacturability of the entire design. This improves the speed and accuracy of optomechanical product designs.

A LensMechanix simulation of a virtual prototype, including the optical and mechanical components


Did you know? Zemax products are supported by in-product help systems, Knowledgebase articles, tutorial videos, webinars, forums, user groups, and email or phone support. Learn more >

Requirement 3: The software must be coupled with specialized training and support.

Even the best software can slow teams down when they’re ramping up if it’s not coupled with standout training and support services. Look for solutions with strategic implementation, hands-on training, and personalized assistance from product design experts.

Strategic implementationIt’s important to find a solution where onboarding is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Your team and your design challenges are unique, and your onboarding solution should be, too. For example, Zemax Virtual Prototyping has a four-step onboarding program that is customized for your organization. We help your teams understand how Zemax software fits into their specific workflows, we equip new users with best practices, and we set the stage for full product adoption. Our engineers guide your team through installing, activating, and running the software, followed by self-paced tutorials.

TrainingContinued training is just as important as onboarding. Training at Zemax is led by our exceptional team of optical and mechanical engineers—and is designed to be hands-on to teach the most useful tips and techniques.Our focused courses to help users master the tools available in our software.

SupportThe right solution will offer customized support provided by qualified optical and mechanical engineers to answer questions about installation, customization, applications, and more. At Zemax, your team can send us the file you’re working on and we can help you through any rough patches. We’re available to keep your team moving forward if you get stuck.


Industry spotlight: Medical microscopes Is your goal to get to market faster? Zemax customer Global Surgical cut product development time in half with Zemax Virtual Prototyping. Read the customer story >

STEP 3:

Determine the benefits of improved optical product design softwareHere are six questions to ask to determine whether your team would benefit from a new solution:

1. Is your team as productive as they could be? Is there confusion about when a design is good enough to go to prototyping? Are the repeated cycles of design, test, and redesign causing delays? The right software should allow your team to complete a current project and move on to the next project in a timely fashion.

2. How is team morale? Do your engineers get frustrated repeating and confirming the same design constraints? Are your engineering teams faced with a lot of back and forth that makes troubleshooting difficult and time consuming? If you’re seeing bottlenecks, the right software can minimize rework required for a product release.

3. Are you staying on budget? Are failed prototypes causing you to go over budget? If design projects tend to run over budget, you might need a new way to identify errors in a design without having to build a physical prototype.

4. Is your software out of date? How long does it take for new members of your team to be productive with your current design software?

Does your design software include tools to support the latest design challenges in the industry? If the UI of the software is outdated, or the software lacks the ability to perform robust product simulations, you should look at better validation tools than may have been available when you purchased your current solution.

5. Are you working with a number of different solutions? Do your teams utilize different file formats? If so, it may be complicating and slowing down the product development process. It may be time to consolidate and look for a single solution that can cover all of your optical product design needs. Managing and supporting multiple tools can have an adverse impact on your budget and the resources needed to maintain their use. Standardizing on a single solution can simplify things greatly.

6. Can your software be customized to meet your unique design needs? Does your software fit the design needs of your team, or do they have to adapt to the software? Does it offer a comprehensive API? If not, your team may not be getting all the information that they need, and it may be time for an update.


Feature spotlight The proprietary Contrast Optimization tool in OpticStudio speeds modulation-transfer-function (MTF) optimization by a factor of 10, and sometimes much more. This feature won a Laser Focus World Innovators Award, which recognizes the most innovative products and services in the photonics and optoelectronics industry. Read more >

STEP 4:

Compare and evaluate optical product design softwareWhen comparing and evaluating optical product design software, the primary considerations are making sure your business objectives are properly addressed by the software’s capabilities and optimizing employee satisfaction.

Align evaluation factors with your business objectives.

Ask yourself these questions when researching and comparing optical product design software to decide whether the software aligns with your business objectives:

1. What technical capabilities are needed in the software?

2. Are my business goals achievable with this software?

3. What is the cost of the software? Can we expect to see a positive return on the investment?

4. Will it be easy to get my team up to speed on using the software? Is there sufficient onboarding, training, and support?

5. Will this software meet my product design needs as they change over time? Are updates made to the software on a regular basis?

6. Will the software provider demo the software and highlight functionalities that can enhance my existing process—and also provide me with a free trial to experience the capabilities first hand?


Feature checklistTo maximize team productivity and develop high-confidence virtual prototypes, make sure your design software includes the following features or functionality:

UI Modern UI to minimize the time required to learn and navigate the software

Multi-threading Multi-threading to utilize the available computing power and run calculations as quickly as possible

Optimization Lens optimization to find designs that meet imaging performance requirements like MTF

Illumination optimization to design systems that meet brightness and color requirements

Tolerancing Lens tolerancing to design systems that are manufacturable and within spec

Illumination tolerancing to perform non-sequential tolerance analyses

CAD Dynamic linking with CAD platforms to dynamically view and modify dimensions of CAD parts

Native CAD geometry creation of optical geometry to open optical designs in CAD software without any file conversion

Optical performance reports within CAD platform to ensure the mechanical components don’t degrade optical performance

Optical tolerance data display within CAD platform to inform mechanical design and specifications

Automatic ray filters within CAD platform to identify and fix components that cause stray light

Optical data retention within CAD platform to maintain design fidelity throughout virtual prototype iterations

Catalogues Source catalogues to simulate the real performance of your system with measured source data

API Complete API to customize the software to meet your team’s design needs


ConclusionThough the evaluation process may seem daunting at first, relying on your existing optical product design software could mean that you’re missing opportunities to improve productivity and reduce bottlenecks. Multiple software companies today claim to offer virtual prototyping solutions, but often they are not able to deliver the features and functionality needed

to support the complete optical product design. Walk through the steps above to ensure that you’ve selected a virtual prototyping solution that maximizes your team’s efficiency, accelerates design validation, and enables you to get to market faster, with greater confidence, and at a lower cost.


Copyright © 2018. Zemax LLC. All rights reserved. LensMechanix and OpticStudio are registered trademarks of Zemax LLC. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

About ZemaxZemax’s industry-leading optical product design software, OpticStudio and LensMechanix, helps optical and mechanical 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.

We touch nearly every optical system manufactured today, including virtual reality systems, cell phone cameras, autonomous-vehicle sensor systems, and intraocular lenses—even imaging systems for the Mars Rover. By listening to our customers, we deliver unmatched value and have the largest, most passionate user base in the industry.

Ready to learn more or request a quote? Contact us [email protected]

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A manager’s four-step guide to buying optical product