Synopsys Launches LucidShape Automotive Lighting Simulation

Synopsys makes available the latest releases of the LucidShape CAA V5 Based and LucidDrive software products for automotive lighting analysis and simulation, which offer new features to support faster design cycles, lower development costs and enhanced realism of headlight simulations.

LucidShape CAA V5 Based offers a comprehensive CATIA-based optical simulations of automotive lighting products. The product's fast, accurate modeling and analysis of part-level models and product-level assemblies have been enhanced in this release with the following major new features:

• Surface sensor for high-accuracy analysis of illuminance and irradiance on curved surfaces. The new surface sensor allows designers to analyze the illuminance and irradiance distributions as a false color map directly in the LucidShape CAA part design view, adjust the scale and color mapping, interactively measure the value at a specific location of the surface sensor and export the simulation data to an ASCII file for additional analysis if required.
• New tools for light guide design and optimization. The latest Light Guide Design Module helps designers model and optimize automotive light guides and their extraction features faster and more flexibly. Designers can create, optimize, and switch between multiple light guides in a part. The Bézier Curve Preview feature provides the ability to visualize Bézier curves prior to applying them to light guide extractors. Optimization system types have been introduced to allow you to set up and more easily optimize eight standard system configurations, including systems that have sources on both ends of the light guide that can be non-symmetric or symmetric.
• Faster simulations with extended GPUTrace support. LucidShape, with its GPUTrace capability, is an optical simulation software to take advantage of graphics processing units to deliver simulation speed increases by orders of magnitude compared to multithreading capabilities. GPUTrace support has been added to the LucidShape CAA ray history sensor feature to dramatically speed analysis of signal lighting functions and reduce the number of design iterations needed to achieve lit appearance requirements and regulatory compliance.

LucidDrive allows designers to simulate the performance of automotive headlamps when driving at night. Major enhancements in LucidDrive version 2018.09 include:

• Resolution improvement for pixel light simulations. LucidDrive supports high-resolution light distributions with the ability to specify a resampling threshold below 0.15° for improved visualization of headlamp pixel light systems.
• Vehicle detection performance enhancement. The LucidDrive vehicle detection feature has been enhanced to allow a higher frames-per-second rating with a larger number of vehicles in the driving simulation. This improves driving simulations for matrix beam and pixel light systems, as well as other dynamic headlights and adaptive front-lighting systems (AFS).
• Motorcycle AFS tilt-switch plugin. An AFS tilt-switch plugin script for motorcycle simulations is now available. The script enables driving simulations to switch headlight functions on and off by the roll angle of the motorcycle.

Sources: Press materials received from the company.