MULTILAYER Platforms and Operating Environment

Simulation Software for Multilayer Optical Stacks

Platforms and Operating Environment

MULTILAYER runs under Windows® 95, 98, 2000, NT, and XP on a personal computer. The program is loaded from a 3.5" floppy diskette onto a working directory on the hard drive. To run MULTILAYER, switch to its working directory and click on the program�s icon. MULTILAYER opens three windows on the monitor: The Dialogue Window is where the program asks questions and expects to receive your answers. Help is automatically displayed in the Guiding Information window; this window stays in the background and you must switch to it manually (by a mouse-click) if you need to look up its contents. The Graphics Window becomes active when you invoke the plotting routine.

Answer all the- questions asked by the program within the Dialogue Window. The questions asked by MULTILAYER are straightforward and easy to answer. In case of difficulty, however, the user should consult the various examples and test_runs included in the program�s manual.

MULTILAYER computes all the relevant functions and saves them to data-files within the working directory. The file SESSION.DAT, for example, will contain the input/output parameters of the run. At the end of each run, you may print this file and keep the printout as a record of the session. Other data-files will contain one-dimensional arrays of ASCII numbers, which may be used for curve plotting. MULTILAYER�s graphic data-files are compatible with most commercial packages such as Matlab®, Origin®, and Mathematica®.

The installation diskette comes with two subdirectories of various data-files. The subdirectory <DFILES> contains several tables of optical parameters of various materials over a range of wavelengths. The user can construct his own tables using these as templates. The <STACKS> subdirectory contains examples of multilayer stacks created by MULTILAYER; these can be readily imported into the program during practice runs. Each time you run MULTILAYER you can create your own multilayer stack and save it within the <STACKS> subdirectory.