FRED optical engineering software from Photon Engineering is a virtual workbench where you can study how your system will really work, FRED is intended for everyone from the infrequent user to the experienced engineer who faces real-world optical engineering problems.

Whether you import your optical design from your favourite lens design program or CAD (STEP and IGES) program or start from scratch, you're ready to do virtual prototyping. Every license of FRED software includes the ability to import and export in both the CAD IGES format and the CAD STEP format. FRED's user-friendly interface lets you add mounting and baffles, and coatings in a flash. Insert off-the-shelf lenses from vendor catalogs. Organize your system model into real-world assemblies and sub-assemblies. Move assemblies effortlessly from one coordinate system to another. With real-time visualization, you know exactly what your hardware looks like at all times.

FRED can be applied to a very broad range of applications including but not limited to: illumination systems, lightpipes, reflectors, imaging systems, projection systems, LEDs, scanners, thermal imaging systems; stray light analyses; laser and interferometric systems; ghost analyses; coherent beam propagation; prototype and experimental system layout; diagnostic analyses; and virtual prototyping. FRED is not just another optical design or analysis program. FRED is the future of optical engineering software!

FREDoptimum, Photon Engineering, LLCs newest edition of FRED, is due to the development of new optimization algorithms able to optimize your optical elements regarding your requirements, like for e.g. LEDs.
Furthermore it takes advantage of the high performance capabilities of today’s multi-cpu systems containing more than 2 cores. FREDoptimum tested systems include the AMD Opteron, Intel Xeon, Itanium, and Pentium IV Hyper-Threading CPU technologies.

FREDoptimum has been tested on these CPUs with typical benchmark results showing an average ray trace speed increase of 3x for a two CPU Opteron Dual Core system (4 cores) over a single CPU in our beta version. Our new Turbo edition dramatically increases ray trace speed by breaking up the raytracing task across multiple CPUs without user intervention. The only CPU with poor benchmarks has been the Hyper-Threaded (HT) CPU type which is a pseudo PCU that does not multitask similar CPU tasks well.