CAMFR / News: Recent posts

Hi,

Thanks to the hard work of Bram De Geyter, there is now an OSX installer in the download section.

Enjoy!

Peter

Hi everyone,

We are happy to announce the release of camfr 20070717. Contrary to what the
version number might suggest, this is not a development release, i.e. you
access it by using

from camfr import *

rather than by

from camfr_work import *

New features are:

- Added code to model spontaneous emission and light extraction in light
emitting diodes, both for planar structures and for structures with a
2D periodic grating in the cavity or in the substrate.
- Now a BlochStack can also be used inside a Stack, either as first term,
last term or both:... read more

Thanks to Lieven Vanholme, there is a new Windows version, compatible with the recently released Numpy 1.0

In anticipation of a future official release, we have made a new binary installer of the development version of CAMFR available.

This fixes a lot of stability problems from the 1.2 version (now already several years old), as well as the 'Unidentifiable C++ exception' errors under recent versions of Windows.

It also contains new features, but there is no documentation for these yet. That will be added in the official release.... read more

Thanks to Lieven Vanholme, there now is a Windows version of CAMFR for Python 2.3.

CAMFR 1.2:

- circular structures can now have multiple radial discontinuities (Mihai
Ibanescu)
- interactive plotting utilities (Lieven Vanholme) to look at fields,
animations, Poynting vectors, save to file, zoom in, ... . Try
plot(Stack), plot(Slab), plot(BlochStack)
- improved stability for Slabs, especially for wide photonic crystal
structures
- a new solver suitable for high loss materials. See set_solver(series)
- added various small utility functions: Stack.width(), BlochStack.width(),
Cavity.width(), Cavity.length(), Cavity.bot_stack(), Cavity.top_stack()
- the MATLAB bindings are updated to the latest versions of MATLAB and
pymat (the latter needs to be installed separately from
http://pymat.sf.net\) (Ross Stanley)

Thanks to Stephen Leary <sleary@elec.gla.ac.uk> there is now a camfr *.deb package for Debian unstable.

Contact Stephen in case of questions about this package.

New in CAMFR 1.1:

- improved stability for Slabs
- inc_S_flux and ext_S_flux are now much faster
- Python doesn't terminate abruptly anymore
when faced with some user errors or lost modes
- the refractive index profile can now be displayed
on top of the field plots (Lieven Vanholme)
- animation of field profiles is much smoother
(Lieven Vanholme)
- field plots can be saved in a variety of formats
(jpg, gif, png, ...) Animations can be saved as
an (uncompressed) animated gif (Lieven
Vanholme)... read more

CAMFR 1.0 is released and contains the following new
features, as well as some interface changes:

- faster binaries, especially under Windows, which can be
up to three times faster than CAMFR 0.9
- new way of defining complicated structures using
geometric shapes and automatic discretisation
- more excitations for cartesian structures: gaussians,
plane waves and arbitrary shaped functions (Lieven
Vanholme)
- support for stacks terminated by an infinite repetition of a
basic period
- more robust method of calculating Bloch modes (Lieven
Vanholme) and their field profiles
- Matlab link under Windows is by default enabled and
installed
- integrated plotting and animation routines for field profiles
in a stack (Lieven Vanholme), optionally using Matlab as
backend
- added stack.n(), stack.mu() and stack.eps()
- added Poynting vector components field.S1(), field.S2()
and field.Sz() and its magnitude field.abs_S()
- better handling of loosely coupled or degenerate
waveguides
- better handling of metals, also metals with purely
imaginary refractive index
- more flexible way of plotting field profiles of modes
- CAMFR now runs reliably under graphical IDE
environments like Idle or ActiveState's PythonWin
- various documentation updates and minor bugfixes
- more graceful handling of user errors... read more

A binary windows package (Pymat) to link CAMFR to Matlab is now available from the download section.

Just install it on top of your existing setup and follow the examples from the CAMFR manual.

This package has been tested with Matlab 6 and Python 2.1

It is now available as a separate package, but will be an integral part of the upcoming CAMFR 1.0 release.

Peter

Thanks to Lieven Vanholme, a Windows binary installer is now available.

Python and Numerical Python need to be installed first, see the README file from the Download section for more information.

Thanks to Lieven Vanholme, developers can now browse the CAMFR class documentation online. This can be accessed through the 'documentation' section on the website.

This is the initial public release of CAMFR, containing source and i686 Linux binaries. Stay tuned for Windows binaries.