Modern User-Interface
The user interface, and software overall, utilizes the latest cutting-edge software libraries. A ribbon-style layout will be very familiar to users of most modern engineering and productivity software. From a data input perspective, modern tables and cell structures make inputting data and parameters very efficient. Plots and graphics are visually rich and interactive.
Object-Based Modeling
Optical components are organized into hierarchies of surfaces, objects, and assemblies. Components can be positioned in global or relative coordinates, and each component can have a unique pivot point defined. All these capabilities prevent the need for coordinate shifting surfaces, which are required in a sequential, surface-based optical model.
Multi-Sequential Raytracing
Ray sequences are defined independent of the optical component definition. This simple paradigm choice drastically simplifies the modeling of optical systems. Regardless of system complexity, each optical component only needs to be defined once. Double passes, subassemblies, and test arms are easily handled by separately defining ray sequences. Any number of ray sequences may be defined and an auto-sequence can be used for systems where the order of optical components also defines the sequential ray path.
Component Editing
The modern UI supports definition of optical components in an optical tree or directly in the 3D viewer. A familiar, mechanical CAD-like tree structure makes component relationships clear with an intuitive way to define systems. For complicated systems, quickly identify, right-click and modify components in the 3D viewer.
Mechanical CAD Integration
Import and export mechanical CAD components. Export components to STP, IGS, and STL formats, with or without rays (supported in the base version). Import the same format mechanical components for visualization purposes and to check ray interference (requires optional toolbox).
Surface Layer Stack
Instead of having to search for specific surface types with the exact set of parameters needed, a flexible surface stack definition enables arbitrary surface properties. In this model, a base surface with a radius and aperture are defined, on top of which various properties are added. Parametric layers include: form/sag, aperture/obscuration, polarization, phase, coating, replication/arrays, and scatter. A wide range of surface forms are supported from standard and aspheres to freeforms/ point clouds. Common polarizing components such as waveplates and linear polarizers are pre-defined. Diffractive optical elements are defined by adding phase profiles to a surface.
Material, coating, lens catalogs
Built in catalogs save time by enabling quick implementation of common materials, coatings and lenses. Material and coating catalogs offer built in plots to understand the characteristics of different choices. The lens catalog can be filtered for criteria of interest to quickly identify off-the-shelf lens systems that will work for a given design.
Import/Export Optics
It is often the case that users will have multiple optical design software packages. Most make it easy to import designs from other formats, but none allow export back to those same formats. Quadoa supports importing optical models from and export to ZMX and SEQ file formats. This enables a seamless workflow with other programs or colleagues/partners that prefer to use other software.
Multi-Configurations
Multiple configuration modeling is an important tool in systems such as scanning mirrors or zoom lenses, and also when doing thermal analysis. The multi-config table supports changing any parameter across different configurations. A thermal pickup capability enables modeling changes across temperatures and athermalization.
Slider Interface
With the slider interface, any parameter can be changed continuously over a range of values to visualize changes to the system. Any open analysis windows will automatically update as the parameter value is changed. A built-in tool provides the ability to record video of any plot or graphic as parameters vary across a defined range.
Math Expressions and Variables
The modern UI enables math expressions to be defined in the multi-config editor and assigned to variables that can be used in any cell that accepts numeric parameters. Supported functions include arithmetic, order of operations, and common trigonometric expressions. These functions also enable solves much more powerful than just common pickups and offsets.
File Version Control
The Quadoa file format (.OPTX) is coded as a text readable XML format. This enables native GIT version control with the same powerful tools software engineers have used for decades.