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). Download the FRED 7.50 technical specifications here.

• 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. Find out more about our fastest edition, FRED Turbo  here
  
  
  
  Recommended System Requirements to run FRED
  Intel^® Duo-Core or AMD^® Athlon x 2 CPU with 1 Gigabyte of RAM
  40GB Harddisk and NVIDIA^® Graphics Card with 128Mb of memory
  
  Preferred Systems to run FRED Turbo
  HP xw8400, Intel^® Dual Quad Core Xeon Processors, E5355 2.66Ghz, 2x 4MB L2, 1333
  Windows^® XP Professional, SP2 with Media, 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3500
  4GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory, 160GB SATA 10K RPM Hard Drive
  or
  Dell Workstation 690, Intel^® Dual Quad Core Xeon CPUs E5355 2.66Ghz, 2x 4MB L2, 1333
  Windows^® XP Professional, SP2 with Media, 256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 3500
  4GB, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, 160GB SATA 10K RPM Hard Drive
   
  What our Customers say about FRED and FRED Turbo:
  "FRED Turbo has reduced the raytrace time by a factor of two with its ability to use all four of the available processor cores.  This decrease in raytracing time factors directly back to hours or days of gained schedule for our customer."

  Frank Grochocki - Ball Aerospace

  “FRED is so powerful, it allows the user's imagination to be the limiting design factor rather than program capabilities.”

  Akash Arora