Computer aided design for teaching modern optics to electronic engineering undergraduates

Rapid developments in the field of modern optics are already having a major impact upon areas such as communications, sensing, information storage and image processing which have hitherto been the province of the electronic engineer. There is a need for evolving new teaching methods for accelerating the acquisition of relevant optical principles by undergraduate students of electronics from an engineering systems aspect rather than from a conventional physics approach. This contribution describes the development of part of a teaching module for this purpose which involves a combination of computer based methods coupled with practical work to provide experience of optical systems. The module is designed to demonstrate the optical information processing capabilities of a simple optical system through the use of ray optics analysis. It forms part of a unit on optical systems for electronic engineers, the other component of which is a supporting lecture course