When manufactured, the resulting lens performance will more closely match the desired requirements than if average glass catalog values for index of refraction were assumed.
Delivery schedules are impacted by glass and mirror blank availability and lead times to acquire, the amount of tooling a shop must fabricate prior to starting on a project, the manufacturing tolerances on the parts (tighter tolerances mean longer fab times), the complexity of any optical coatings that must be applied to the finished parts, further complexities in mounting or bonding lens elements into cells and in the overall lens system assembly, and any post-assembly alignment and quality control testing and tooling required.
Lens optimization techniques that can navigate this multi-dimensional space and proceed to local minima have been studied since the 1940s, beginning with early work by James G. Baker, and later by Feder,[3] Wynne,[4] Glatzel,[5] Grey[6] and others.
Prior to the development of digital computers, lens optimization was a hand-calculation task using trigonometric and logarithmic tables to plot 2-D cuts through the multi-dimensional space.
Popular optical design software includes Zemax's OpticStudio, Synopsys's Code V, and Lambda Research's OSLO.