Customization Tools for Parameter Sweeps

Being able to vary the parameters of an optical system is a key part of the analysis of any setup, in order to better understand how the system will behave in the face of anything from manufacturing errors to potential misalignment of the components. Designing a system that shows robustness when confronted with these unavoidable deviations from the idealized intended design can be just as important as, if not even more than, finding an initial design that perfectly fulfills all the specifications.

With this in mind, the fast physical optics modeling and design software VirtualLab Fusion offers its Parameter Run document: a tool that allows the user to flexibly configure the variation of all system parameters and analyze the corresponding results. In today's newsletter, we would like to show how this tool can improve the optical engineer's workflow with two examples. In the first example, we examine the properties of a collimating lens and automatically export the detector results to a specified file path (for additional post-processing, for instance). In the second example, we use the fully customizable programmable mode of the Parameter Run to realize different random distributions for the variations of the parameters of interest, in order to perform a tolerance analysis of a sawtooth grating.