A user-friendly diffraction modeling program

Optical data storage systems require a great deal of sophistication in their design and analysis. It is often necessary to simulate portions of the optical system with ray tracing or diffraction modeling. This paper introduces a new program called OPTISCAN that operates in the MATLAB/sup TM/ language environment. OPTISCAN combines many of the routines we have developed over the last several years for modeling optical data storage systems and other applications, as well as some new capabilities, In addition to its powerful simulation capabilities, OPTISCAN solves a common problem with simulation codes. Often it takes a significant amount of time for a student or engineer to learn how to use either in-house or commercial programs. A unique aspect of OPTISCAN is its graphical user interface (GUI) that makes programming much less complicated and makes OPTISCAN easy to use. This paper describes the GUI with a simple example. An optical disk application is also described.