Integrated approach to opto-mechanical system development

Over the past few decades of computer aided engineering growth there has been much more progress in increasing the power and capability of function specific engineering tools (e.g., optical design, finite element analysis, etc.) than in the integration of and communication between these tools. With only a few notable exceptions, such as FEA being imbedded into solid modeling, the communication method between the function specific tools continues to be dominated by translation to neutral data formats (e.g., IGES, STEP) and file transfer. There are a number of problems with this approach. The translation is a serial process where an engineer has to stop at some point in the design, make the neutral file, send that file to the next function, and wait for feedback. The translation through a neutral format is typically one way so the whole translation process has to be repeated when changes are required. Revision tracking of multiple files for each design iteration is both critical and a likely source of errors. Also, as with any translation, some information is always lost or corrupted in the process. This paper describes some progress that has been made in more tightly integrating optical design, mechanical design, fabrication, and testing of optical systems. Tools have been developed that connect CODE V ®[1] to SolidWorks ®[2]