Virtual Prototyping
Exclusive of the hype, “virtual prototyping” simply means constructing an integrated optical and mechanical model of a system and assessing its performance before the hardware is actually fabricated and assembled. It is a key element of modern product development whose benefits include, among others, increased productivity, reduced product development costs, and identification of performance problems before hardware is committed. In the course of supporting our own consulting customers, we build virtual prototypes of systems on a daily basis. In some cases, these are static models created to assess the propagation of light under a single operational scenario (i.e., an LED illuminating a lightpipe that, in turn, illuminates an object under test). In our modeling of molded plastic optics, for example, we frequently write BASIC scripts to vary the off-axis illumination angle to interrogate the formation of ghost images across the FOV. We have also created elaborate end-to-end models composed of illumination devices, samples under test, collection optics, and the detector; during the simulation, the properties of the samples were modified by a script, the system was raytraced, and the detector outputs written out to a file. This type of simulation is invaluable for the electrical engineer who is designing the detector amplifier and needs to know the expected signal levels to set the gain. FRED has been developed to give the user all of the tools necessary to virtually prototype his system.	FRED's visualization capabilities allow the user to create photorealistic renderings of the model FTIR spectrometer & outputs

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