Hi everyone! Summer is in full swing here in Tempe, Arizona with temperatures hitting 118 earlier this month. Accompanying this hot weather is the exciting new Ansys Optics site! The website has been updated to finally capture all three Ansys Optics solutions – Ansys Lumerical, Ansys Zemax OpticStudio, and Ansys Speos.
Initially, the site was used as a landing page for Lumerical users. It housed the Lumerical Help documentation, product descriptions, and the Lumerical Application Gallery. As Speos and Zemax were acquired, the teams at Ansys worked steadily to add Speos and Zemax footprints to the website. The final integration and consolidation of Knowledge Bases has been made live as of August 1st, 2025!
Let’s Start Our Tour of the Ansys Optics Site
Let’s take a tour of the new landing page together. At the top of the page the same drop-down options are still available, with the Products pages directing users to the Ansys Optics pages on the main Ansys website. The Solutions pages now take users to each solution’s Knowledge Base hosted within the Ansys Optics site—more on this later. The Learn and Get Help pages direct users to the appropriate Ansys resource like the Ansys Learning Hub (ALH), Ansys Learning Forum (ALF), Ansys Innovation Courses (AIC), Ansys Support (ACSS), etc. The last drop-down menu item is the “Evaluate for Free” links that redirects users to the respective trial forms for the optical solutions.
As before, the search bar is still front and center, allowing users to access the appropriate information hosted in the Knowledge Bases and the Application Gallery efficiently.
The next section of the landing page is the exciting stuff, the new features. First, users will notice announcements for upcoming webinars. When clicking on an upcoming webinar, users are redirected to the registration for that event. I am happy to see these upcoming webinars announced on the first page of the website! Previously, upcoming webinars were not announced on the site, which forced users to find these upcoming webinars through other means. Having a single place for users of the optical and photonics tools to get all the information relevant to them should help drive engagement within the community.
Next down from the upcoming webinars is the new directory for the Knowledge Bases! Not only are there links for the Lumerical, Zemax, and Speos Knowledge Bases, they also include Installation & Licensing and the High-Performance Computing (HPC) collective articles for users to have readily available. This is great and I expect that this will help new users speed through setting up their license and installation of the Ansys Optics solutions.
The Application Gallery on the Ansys Optics Site follows and not much has changed from the previous version of the website, but I do expect to see more application examples of all three of the Ansys Optics Solutions soon.
So, the real question, what is the layout of the Knowledge Bases on this new Ansys Optics site? What should users expect when trying to navigate through these new waters? I clicked on the Zemax Knowledge Base, and I was surprised by the neatness and organization of it. Users will first encounter an introduction to Zemax OpticStudio and its Knowledge Base:
The articles are organized into 10 categories: Getting Started & FAQ, Learning Paths, System Set-Up, File Import/Export, System Analysis, System Optimization, System Tolerancing, Programing Zemax OpticStudio, STAR, and Tutorials & Applications. If the abundance of choice overwhelms users, the Search bar on the top right should help them find the exact article or topic of interest.
The articles themselves look the same as they did in the Zemax KnowledgeBase on support.zemax.com, the only major difference is the layout of the article:
On the left, the content and sections of the article are outlined. On the right, the associated files for the article are provided along with a list of related articles and recently viewed articles. The article format itself, the part that has all the content we really care about, looks exactly like it did before! Except for maybe some font changes and image size differences.
And it doesn’t stop there, the Learning Paths have also gotten a face-lift for the Ansys Optics site, well, at least in my opinion. The learning paths are separated by their courses, with a quick description of teach course available when users select the “+” sign on the left of each course title. This new layout for the leaning paths is concise and should provide clarity to users that are trying to follow the learning paths for their own professional and educational use of the tools.
Now, if you are a devoted Zemax User with decades of experience with the Zemax Knowledgebase, I am sure you are thinking to yourself, what does that look like now? Bare bones aside from the announcement that it has been moved to the Ansys Optics site.
Users will also notice that each article is linked to the new Ansys Optics site article ID so that users can quickly update their bookmarks. Every article is also set with a redirect to the new Ansys Optics article link, but this will only last until September 1st, after that, users will need to use the new Knowledge Base to find their beloved articles and examples. It certainly feels like an end of an era, and I am sure there are more changes to come with the announcement of the Synopsys acquisition. I expect more purple in our horizons 😊.
Let me know what you think of the new Knowledge Bases and the new Ansys Optics site! Do you already miss support.zemax.com? Are you hopeful for the future of Ansys Optics and solution integration?? We would love to hear from you!
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