Fast and comfortable GPU-accelerated wave-optical simulation for imaging properties and design of highly aspheric 3D-printed freeform microlens systems

Modern 3D-printing technologies allow for the production of very small and complex microscale optical systems, which require examination of wave-optical effects within their design process. Common optical design software employs ray-tracing as their basic concept, which is not capable of fully simulating wave-optical effects. Rigorous methods, which solve electromagnetic field equations, are very time consuming and require more proficiency of the users. We present an application of the Wave Propagation Method (WPM), which is able to accurately simulate wave-optical effects in forward direction, while providing a reasonably fast calculation time utilizing both central- and graphics processing units (CPU and GPU) as an easy-to-use plugin for the open-source software ITOM.