The Deformable Phase Plate now exists as something you can drop straight into a ray-trace. The DPP Digital Model is a Dynamic Link Library for Ansys Zemax OpticStudio: you add it to your design as a User Defined surface, and from there the DPP behaves in the model the way the device behaves on the bench — including the limits of what it can physically do.

One surface, two ways to drive it

Once the DLL is in the lens data editor, the DPP is a surface like any other and its parameters are optimization variables like any other surface’s. You can drive it in Zernike space — up to 36 coefficients, reaching the 7th radial order — or directly in voltage space, one value for each of the 63 transparent electrodes. Zernike space is the language of an aberration budget; voltage space is the language of the hardware, and it optimizes faster, because nothing has to be inverted between the two.

Built on a measured device, with Photonics Precision Engineering

The model was developed with Photonics Precision Engineering in Jena, an optical design firm staffed by senior designers out of the Jena optics ecosystem. It is empirical rather than idealized: the surface it produces comes from the measured response of a real DPP, and the device’s boundary conditions are built into the DLL. What optimizes inside the model is something the hardware can actually produce.

“The empirical model behind this DLL ensures that all the results obtained are also reproducible with a ‘real’ DPP in practice.” — Photonics Precision Engineering

A gloved hand holding the Deformable Phase Plate chip: an octagonal substrate with contact tracks radiating out to the black ring around its clear aperture
The device the model describes: 63 individually addressed transparent electrodes around the clear aperture, deforming a membrane over a sealed fluid chamber. Their measured influence on the wavefront is what the DLL reproduces.

It gives you back the voltages

The model does not stop at a wavefront. After every change you make in OpticStudio, the DLL writes out the electrode voltages that produced it as a plain text file. Those are the numbers you apply to the device — so the design you optimized on screen and the hardware on the bench end on the same values, with nothing to re-derive in between.

Getting it

The Digital Model was released generally on 2 August 2023, after a closed alpha and a first showing at the Optica Design and Fabrication Congress in Québec. It is free on registration and ships with a user manual and example files for both the Zernike-space and the voltage-space workflow. It needs a working Ansys Zemax OpticStudio installation; everything else — the fluid layers, the materials, the refractive indices — is traced inside the DLL, so there is nothing to build around the surface.

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This announcement dates from June 2023 and has been updated to describe the released product.