FRED Optimum (FRED) is an advanced optical engineering software program capable of simulating the propagation of light through virtually any optical/mechanical system, download the latest brochure here. FRED has two methods of propagating light, through either standard raytracing or a Gaussian beam decomposition algorithm to propagate coherent optical fields. FRED has been under development for over 10 years and currently contains approximately 470,000 lines of C++ code. (This does not include code that is part of third-party graphics routines and the BASIC compiler). Download the FRED 9.10 technical specifications here. FRED was developed with the following goals in mind: * Make rapid virtual prototyping accessible to engineers with a broad range of experience levels * Use a Dynamic System Tree to order Curves, Surfaces, Custom Elements and Subassemblies to create geometry and order objects into layers * Offer a high level of visualization and user interaction with a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) Interface * Position any object versus any other object using multiple coordinate systems (i.e., local, global, self, other object, versus parent or subassembly) * Includes IGES, and STEP translators for geometry import and export and optical translators for optical design import * Introduce new support tools for the fastest geometry, materials, coating creation (i.e., digitizer, etc) and modification (i.e., parametric modeling, etc) with multiple aperture capability * Compiled Visual Basic scripting with extended FRED functionality to think outside the box * NEW Optimization tool to provide users with a hybrid general optimization algorithm that is non-sequential, allows for multiple targets, has fractional weighting capability to link variables and utilizes several built-in merit functions for unusual tasks. * Give engineers a new tool to complement existing software using non-sequential multi-threading algorithms for faster raytracing. Find out more about our fastest and most powerful edition, FRED Optimum here