Here is an image of his optical system:įor more details and to see the exact solution that Dr. His techniques included making a faux GRIN lens, designing the focusing lens in CODE V, managing the complexity with a series of configurations, and aligning the ray bundles. Jacobsen was able to create a system in LightTools with about 24% efficiency. The design entry with the most power won.ĭr. The key judging criterion was the power collected on the 1mm 2 target when tracing the Prince Lambert rays backward through the contestant’s optical system.
To judge the submissions, a figure of merit was published for the problem. Standard Cell Library Evaluation with Multiple-lithography-compliant verification and Improved Synopsys Pin Access Checking Utility. To recreate the mystery optical system, contestants could make any optical system they desired, subject to restrictions. Contestants had to create their own optical system such that when the output rays were run backward through it, as many rays as possible would land on the original source as closely as possible to the original position. Then they ran two million rays from the source through a complex optical setup to scramble the rays. The challenge was to create an optical system to put as much of poor Prince Lambert back together as possible, preferably in the right order.Īs part of the problem definition, the committee used a 1mm x 1mm source (Lambertian, of course) and apodised it to look like Prince Lambert.
(Nasdaq: SNPS), a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing, today announced the Best Paper Awards for the twentieth annual Synopsys Users' Group (SNUG) San Jose conference, held in Santa Clara, Calif. The background of the 2021 problem was a fantastical story about Prince Lambert, who was sleeping peacefully in his bed when the evil wizard Étendue cast a curse on him using a mystery optical system, splitting him into two million pieces. MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., April 12 / PRNewswire-FirstCall / - Synopsys, Inc. What was the design problem and how did he produce the solution? Jake Jacobsen, used LightTools illumination design software to solve the 2021 illumination problem. The problems are intentionally hypothetical, extremely difficult to solve, and are purely for entertainment.Ī member of our Optical Solutions team, Dr. How can you split someone up and put them back together? This was the illumination design problem posed at the 2021 International Optical Design Conference (IODC), hosted by the Optical Society of America, now Optica.Īt every IODC, optical designers are invited to participate in a competition to solve lens and illumination design problems created by committees.