Future of Global Optimization in Lens Design

Abstract

With the incredible increase in the power of computers, lens designers can begin to contemplate strategies that would not have been possible before. More configurations can be tried; more rays can be traced; evaluation schemes can be more sophisticated. Still, there are the questions that nag every lens designer: Is that the best you can do? Isn’t there a better configuration with different glasses, curvatures, and thicknesses? The limited success of the conventional design methods in reaching the global minimum is mainly due to the fact that the solution is crucially dependent on the initial configuration. As a result, conventional design methods work satisfactorily and converge quickly to a good solution, only if a good choice of a starting point had been made. Most often, the routine ends up in an unfavorable configuration that does not satisfy the design requirements. It is not unusual for this to happen several times during the first design sessions.