I am looking for open source or free software to design and simulate VCSEL cavities and other photonic / optical devices.
Windows or Linux based would be preferred.
Thanks a lot but it shows 30 days trial.
I found http://www.ipkiss.org/
I am not sure, how easy it would be to learn.
Hi Vijay,
Try CAMFR http://camfr.sourceforge.net/
CAMFR is limited to 2D but fast and useful for initial designs.
I could install CAMFR only on Windows (7 or 8) and had to install a whole list of Python modules - not so obvious. If you need help, let me know [email protected]
Also, for a full 3D simulation, FDTD, try OpenEMS, openems.de
I use both packages for my integrated optics design. OpenEMS is fairly well supported but the nature of FDTD is to be slow and take large resources - especially for optics due to the large number of wavelengths required in the simulation space.
Yes Phil Marsh, I will try it again, as I used it two years back, probably on ubuntu. It would be pleasure to play with it.
Hi Vijay,
Is this OpenEMS you speak of or CAMFR? Actually, I use CAMFR on WINE on Ubuntu 14.04. I strongly recommend CAMFR - so long as you're not simulating metals. It seemed that CAMFR had some stability problems when simulations included metals. While it's 2D only (with some other restrictions) CAMFR could be useful because it's considerably faster than FDTD for 2D.
For FDTD, I recommend first running your simulations as quasi 2D, whereby you take advantage of perfect magnetic or electric conductor boundary conditions to exploit symmetries. Anything you can do to reduce the number of cells will improve performance, which is key to optimization.
Please let me know if you have any questions,
Thanks,
Phil
Thanks a lot Phil for your helping hand. I will check my PC again and will get back to you with more questions :D
I agree that CAMFR is a useful tool for VCSELs, especially because Beinstman's FMM method is very well suited to thin layers, especially repeating layers (for speed). He's also already got examples and functions for calculating VCSEL thresholds etc. (I also love the CAMFR syntax.)
The current difficulty with CAMFR is that it runs on an outdated Python 2.7 for Windows, or an even older Python 2.5 on Mac, with older dependencies, so a modern Python (eg. Anaconda or PythonXY) install may not run CAMFR right away - you might need to track down and install older packages (like MatplotLib 0.99, etc.).
I would like to ask similar question. Do we have open source optical system design and simulation Software similar to Optisystem? The commercial one is too expensive..
Dear Marsh
Please i wanto install CAMF in my labtop, but when i run a program there's some errors
Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages\camfr\visualisation\examples\plot_blochstack.py", line 9, in from camfr import * ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'camfr'
Please can you give advice, what's requirment to make the installation!
Thank you
You can effectively use CAMFR for modal BPM or Meep for FDTD. As far as I am concerned, I develop a new modal BPM concurrent to CAMFR call RSM. You can obtain a Mac OS X version at sourceforge here : https://sourceforge.net/projects/rsmvisit/
Compared to CAMFR it comes with a GUI an permit to enter geometry of arbitrary form with proprietary file format, scripts or DXF files. It comes with powerful 2D and 3D visualization thanks to the Visit software.
I am currently porting this software to Windows.
It is however limited to 2D geometries with losses materials.
This is an optical system design software based on python.
Hope you find it helpful.
https://github.com/quartiq/rayopt [not maintained regularly]
https://github.com/mjhoptics/ray-optics [maintained regularly]
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