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)
- Include 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
- Give engineers a new tool to complement existing software
using non-sequential multi-threading algorithms for faster raytracing
Recommended System Requirements to run
FRED
Intel® Duo-Core or AMD®
Athlon x 2 CPU with 1 Gigabyte of RAM and Windows®
XP
40GB Harddisk and either an ATI® or
NVIDIA® Graphics Card with 128Mb of
memory
Premium System (Dell 390 Desktop) to run
FRED
Turbo
Intel® Core™2 Extreme QX6700 2.66GHz/1066MHz/8MB L2/Quad-core/VT
Genuine Windows® XP Professional, SP2 with Media
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3450, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI + VGA
2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (4 DIMMS)
320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache™
“FRED is so powerful, it allows the user's imagination to be the limiting design factor rather than program capabilities.”
Akash Arora
FRED Overview
FRED
is an advanced optical engineering
software program capable of simulating
the propagation of light through virtually
any optical/mechanical system.
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 400,000 lines of C++ code.
(This does not include code that is part of
third-party graphics routines and the
BASIC compiler.)