Photon Engineering FRED, Software Limits

Software Limits

By design, there are no limits in FRED! The user can define as many lenses, mirrors, prisms, custom elements composed of surfaces and curves, assemblies, subassemblies, materials, coatings, scatter models, wavelengths, sources, rays, etc. as the user’s computer resources will allow. Likewise, surface definitions can have as many aspheric and/or polynomial terms as needed.

We built this into FRED's architecture because “real world” problems are not constrained; we believe that FRED should not be constrained either. As consultants, we’ve worked on system models with over 20,000 surfaces. One of our clients has built a FRED model with 800 wavelengths to model a specific dispersive effect. Another client modeled a Fresnel lens with several thousand points defining the cross sectional curve. What will your problem require?

We are passionate about another point related to limits: there are only two editions of FRED and both have the same optical and analysis capabilities. The only difference between the two editions is that our Standard edition will raytrace on up to 2 cores and our Turbo edition will raytrace on up to 16 cores. We do not market “scaled down” or reduced capability versions of FRED and then expect our users to upgrade (for an additional price) when they outgrow its capabilities. Every copy of FRED grows to meet the demands of its user.