Software is under development at Teledyne Brown Engineering to represent a lens configuration as a y-ybar or Delano diagram. The program determines third-order Seidel and chromatic aberrations for each configuration. It performs a global search through all valid permutations of configuration space and determines, to within a step increment of the space, the configuration with smallest third-order aberrations. The program was developed to generate first-order optical layouts which promised to reach global minima during subsequent conventional optimization. Other operations allowed by the program are: add or delete surfaces, couple surfaces (for Mangin mirrors), shift the stop position, and display first-order properties and the optical layout (surface radii and thicknesses) for subsequent entry into a conventional lens-design program with automatic optimization. Algorithms for performing some of the key functions, not covered by previous authors, are discussed in this paper.

Date Published: 1 December 1991
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 1527, Current Developments in Optical Design and Optical Engineering, (1 December 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.48634

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1527:
Current Developments in Optical Design and Optical Engineering
Robert E. Fischer; Warren J. Smith, Editor(s)