Knowledge

Space Optics

Lambda Research software in space and astronomy projects

In space there is no servicing, no swapping of a lens, and no second attempt. A telescope, camera, or lidar has to work correctly from the first power-up in orbit, and stray light that could be measured and reduced on Earth can destroy the contrast of an entire instrument in space. That is why Lambda Research software, especially TracePro and OSLO, has appeared for years in NASA projects and other space missions.

Telecommunications

Simulation of broadband fiber-optic networks: from the fiber to a complete transmission system

The growing capacity of fiber-optic networks places ever greater demands on the entire transmission path. It is not enough to choose a fiber with suitably low attenuation: in a real system, chromatic dispersion, PMD, noise, transmitter and receiver limitations, optical amplifiers, filters, WDM multiplexers, and nonlinear effects all occur at the same time. That is why simulating a broadband fiber-optic network is, above all, a system-level problem.

Optical Coatings

Thin-film coating design in optical engineering

Thin-film coatings are one of the fundamental tools of optical engineering: thin, multilayer dielectric stacks deposited on the surface of an element, which, through the interference of light, shape its reflection, transmission, and polarization in ways the substrate material alone cannot achieve. Designing such a coating well, however, requires more than a single reflectance value at a single wavelength.

Waveguide modeling

Advanced modeling of waveguides and optical sensors

An optical waveguide can be not only a path for transmitting light, but also an active measuring element. A change in temperature, in the refractive index of the surroundings, in stress, geometry, or material properties can change the parameters of a propagating mode. If we can predict and measure this change, the waveguide becomes a sensor.

Optical Design

Collimator design: engineering tools

A collimator is one of the basic elements of many optical and photonic systems. Its job seems simple: convert divergent light into a beam with the smallest possible divergence or, in the opposite direction, properly couple a collimated beam to a source or receiver. In practice, however, collimator design quickly stops being a matter of simply choosing a lens with the right focal length.

Tolerance analysis

Tolerance analysis of optical systems in OSLO

A mathematically correct optical system design can fail on the assembly line if it does not account for the realities of the manufacturing process. No optical element will ever be produced with perfect precision — there will always be some spread in radius of curvature, thickness, decentration, or tilt. Tolerance analysis checks how much spread a design can actually tolerate before it stops meeting its requirements.

Design verification

Verifying engineering designs in optics

An optical system design can be mathematically correct on paper and still contain an error that only surfaces during production — or worse, only at the customer's site. Design verification is an independent check meant to catch such problems before they become expensive.

Optical metrology

Interferometry analysis in instrument design

Interferometers are among the most precise, and at the same time the most sensitive to design errors, of all optical instruments. Their operation relies on the controlled interference of two or more beams, so even a small deviation from the design — an optical path error on the order of a fraction of a wavelength — can destroy fringe contrast and render a measurement useless.

Micro-optics

Simulating micro-optical systems: the challenges

Micro-optics — microlenses, diffractive elements, micro-sensors, microlens arrays — looks like a miniaturized version of classical optics, but scale changes the rules of the game. Once a structure's dimensions approach the wavelength of light, diffraction effects stop being a negligible disturbance and become the dominant phenomenon that determines how the system behaves.

ROI & the R&D process

How to reduce R&D costs with optical simulation?

Every optical or photonic project involves costly prototypes and long test cycles. Simulation software lets you predict how a system will behave before the first physical element ever exists — and that changes the cost structure of an entire R&D project far more than the license price alone suggests.

New release

TracePro 26.3 — new Section View: look inside your optical geometry

Lambda Research has released TracePro 26.3 (September 4, 2026). The headline feature is Section View — a rendered cross-section for inspecting a model's internal geometry. The release also brings 33 updates since 26.2, spanning model inspection, analysis accuracy, CAD interoperability, automation and everyday workflows.

Space

Simulating Earth-to-space optical links: modelling the atmospheric channel in OptiSystem before you build hardware

Free-space optics (FSO) is one of the fastest-growing areas of photonics in Europe. Laser downlinks between satellites and the ground promise throughputs unreachable by radio, but they bring their own set of design challenges: atmospheric turbulence, scintillation and pointing accuracy. These effects decide whether the link holds its power budget under real conditions, and testing them on hardware is costly and slow — which is why more and more R&D teams start with simulation.

Quantum photonics

Simulating quantum photonic systems: new horizons

Quantum technologies are increasingly moving beyond fundamental-physics laboratories. Photonic quantum systems are being developed for secure communication, single-photon generation and detection, photonic integrated circuits, and new methods of information processing. In practice this also changes how such systems are designed — before building an experimental setup, engineers increasingly need to check how sources, polarization elements, fibers, free-space channels and single-photon detectors will work together.

Fiber Optics

Analysing loss in optical fibers with OptiFiber

Loss is one of the basic parameters of any fiber-optic path. In a transmission system it is most often described by an attenuation coefficient in dB/km, but that simplification isn't always enough when designing the fiber itself. The designer isn't only interested in "how much power will be left after 10 kilometres?", but also in why the fiber loses power and how changing its geometry affects that loss.

Optoelectronics

Simulating optoelectronic circuits in OptiSPICE

Electronics and photonics are increasingly ceasing to be separate parts of a device. A laser is driven by an electronic circuit, a photodiode works together with a transimpedance amplifier, a modulator receives an electrical signal, and the whole circuit can include feedback loops that cross between the optical and electrical domains. In that case, simulating the optics separately from the electronics may not be enough.

LiDAR | Automotive

Designing LiDAR systems for autonomous platforms

LiDAR is one of the most demanding examples of an optical system. It has to emit a controlled laser beam, steer it into space, collect the tiny fraction of light reflected from an object, separate the useful signal from background, and determine distance from the timing or another property of the signal. In autonomous systems, on top of that come sunlight, glare from other vehicles and infrastructure, contamination, vibration, tight packaging constraints, and a very low level of light returning to the receiver.

Sensing

Designing optical sensors for industry

An optical sensor is a far more complex system than the phrase "light source plus photodetector" suggests. How it behaves can depend on propagation in a waveguide, changes in refractive index, resonance, reflection from a Bragg grating, scattering, absorption, lens geometry, stray light, and the readout electronics. That is why sensor design is such a good illustration of why photonics relies on several different kinds of simulation.

Fiber Optics | Guide

Software for fiber design — from the refractive-index profile to a complete system

An optical fiber can look, at first glance, like a simple element: a core, a cladding, and light guided over long distances. From a designer's point of view, though, it is a wave structure whose geometric and material parameters determine its modes, dispersion, loss, birefringence, polarization, effective mode area, and susceptibility to nonlinear effects. That is why there is no single, universal "fiber software" — within the Optiwave ecosystem, the central tool for designing the fiber itself is OptiFiber.

Measurement & Automation

Automating photonic measurements: OptiInstrument

In a photonics lab, running a single measurement is rarely the hardest part. What gets difficult is running the same measurement reliably hundreds or thousands of times, across different wavelengths, power levels, temperatures, driving voltages or device configurations. That is exactly where instrument automation comes in.

Telecommunications

How is a fiber-optic link simulated? From the transmitter to BER

Simulating an optical link does not start at the fiber and does not end with checking whether light appears at the output. Information passes through the whole chain: from the data generator, through the transmitter and modulation, the fiber and intermediate elements, to the receiver, where the signal is turned back into data. A system-level simulation builds a model from connected blocks — transmitter, fiber, amplifiers, filters, receiver — and checks the effect the whole path has on transmission quality. This guide shows how it works: from bits, through the eye diagram and Q-factor, to BER.

Optical Design

Optimising optical systems: best practices

Designing an optical system rarely ends with finding a solution that simply „works”. We want it to work as well as possible — high transmission, adequate bandwidth, low loss, the right spectral response, low aberration, high tolerance to parameter changes and, in production, manufacturability with a given process. This leads to the next stage of working with simulation: we not only simulate the system, but use the simulation to optimise it. And good optimisation does not start by running an algorithm — it starts by correctly defining the problem.

Photonics

PIC : the photonic integrated circuit. What is it and which tools are used to design it?

A Photonic Integrated Circuit (PIC) is the photonic counterpart of an integrated circuit — instead of transistors and electrical connections, it integrates on a single substrate the elements responsible for guiding, splitting, combining, modulating, filtering, and detecting light. The idea itself is simple; the difficulty starts with design, because the geometry of the device is directly tied to its optical properties. That is why designing a PIC is not one simulation task, but a chain of models at different levels of detail. This guide shows which Optiwave and Lambda Research program handles which level.

Precision Optics

What is stray light and why does it matter? A guide to scattered-light analysis

Stray light, or unwanted light, is radiation that reaches a place where it should not be — a detector or an image plane by a path other than the designed optical path. In imaging systems it lowers contrast and image quality, in detection systems it raises the background and worsens the signal-to-noise ratio, and in laser systems it creates additional power-propagation paths. This guide explains where stray light comes from, why it is a problem for the whole opto-mechanical assembly, and how it is analysed with non-sequential ray tracing.

Numerical Methods

How does the FDTD method work, and when should you use it? A guide to photonic simulation

FDTD (Finite-Difference Time-Domain) is one of the most important numerical methods for modelling light propagation and the interaction of electromagnetic waves with photonic structures. It solves Maxwell's equations directly in the time and space domain, so it can analyse phenomena that geometrical optics alone cannot describe reliably — from waveguides and resonators to photonic crystals and diffractive elements. This guide explains how FDTD simulation works, how to prepare a model, and when to reach for this method instead of BPM or mode analysis.

Photonics

Photonics in industry: simulation and design

Photonics increasingly ends up inside industrial devices and systems: fiber links, sensors, optoelectronic circuits, and photonic integrated circuits (PIC). Designing a single component is not enough — you have to check its behaviour at the level of the photonic structure, the optical-electronic circuit, and the whole system. This guide organises the photonic design process and shows how to match the method — mode analysis, BPM, FDTD, circuit simulation, or system simulation — to the level of the problem.

Optical simulation methods

What is ray tracing? Applications in optical engineering

Ray tracing is one of the fundamental methods for simulating light propagation. Used both in 3D rendering and in professional engineering software, it lets you predict how light will behave in a designed optical system before it is built. In this article we explain how it works, how engineering ray tracing differs from graphics ray tracing, and where it is used in practice.

Choosing software

Methods for modelling optical phenomena: ray tracing, FDTD, BPM, EME

Modelling optical phenomena is the numerical reproduction of light propagation and its interaction with matter — from macroscopic lens systems to photonic nanostructures. There is no single method that works everywhere: the choice between ray tracing and full electrodynamics decides the accuracy, the computational cost, and which effects you will even see in the result. This guide organises the methods — ray tracing, FDTD, BPM, EME, mode solver, RCWA and system simulation — and shows when to reach for which.

Choosing software

How to choose optical simulation software?

The market for optical and photonic simulation software offers dozens of tools. The right choice depends on the scale of your system, the purpose of the simulation and the design stage — and also on how the tool fits into your process: from CAD integration to the licensing model and support. This guide walks through each of these criteria in turn.