LightTools Offers New Modeling and Analysis Features for Illumination Design

Synopsys, Inc. today announced the release of version 9.0 of its LightTools illumination design software, which delivers powerful new modeling and analysis features that augment LightTools' industry-leading design capabilities, reliability, and accuracy.

LightTools 9.0 provides new tools to model and analyze polarizing elements with birefringent materials, which are increasingly used in advanced applications such as AR/VR headsets and biomedical instruments. New charts allow designers to easily assess the polarization state and orientation and identify how to maximize flux. The new polarization modeling tools are included in the LightTools Advanced Physics Module, which provides flexible programming extensions to develop custom optical parts and cutting-edge illumination subsystems.

LightTools has comprehensive capabilities to help optical engineers pinpoint and correct stray light issues during product design. Enhancements to the LightTools stray light analysis toolkit include:

• Intensified ray tracing – LightTools now traces up to one trillion rays in an illumination system, lifting the sampling limits for virtually all Monte Carlo simulations. This expanded ray trace limit allows designers to achieve extremely accurate results for stray light analysis and luminance calculations.
• Aim area capabilities for measured bidirectional scattering distribution function (BSDF) surfaces – BSDF data is often used to provide high-accuracy simulations of scattering surface characteristics. The aim area feature allows designers to examine selected portions of a surface's scatter distribution, and this can significantly improve stray light analysis efficiency, particularly for illumination optics used in AR/VR/MR devices, heads-up displays, and autonomous vehicles.

LightTools offers optimization tools created especially to solve the unique requirements of illumination system design. In version 9.0, the LightTools Backlight Pattern Optimization utility allows designers to optimize performance of display systems with curved panel shapes. Designs created with the utility can conform to a dashboard, rotate about a user's field of view, and have custom shapes – all with high spatial uniformity.