FRED can be used as either an automation client (controlling or calling program) or automation server (program called by controlling application). This feature allows FRED to be used in large, multidisciplinary analyses that are becoming more and more common in sophisticated product development engineering.

Most commonly, FRED is used as a server. Another program such as Matlab^™, Mathematica^™, Excel^™ etc. creates an instance of FRED and then executes FRED scripts that return the results of calculations. Since FRED ’s scripting language has complete access to its database, the requested calculations can alter geometry and sources, raytrace, compute ray statistics and irradiance distributions, and so on. In this manner, FRED can be used as a remote computational engine for performing optical calculations. With compiled BASIC scripts, FRED ’s calculations are rapid and easy to develop!

Executing FRED from inside Excel