Abstract
The present study covers an integrated simulation method to evaluate optical performance of an aspheric plastic lens by connecting an injection molding analysis with a ray tracing simulation. Traditional ray tracing methods have based on the assumption that the optical properties of a lens are homogeneous throughout the entire volume. This assumption is to a certain extent unrealistic for injection-molded plastic lenses because material properties vary at every point due to the injection molding effects. To take into account the effects of the inhomogeneous optical properties of the molded lens, a numerical scheme is developed to calculate the distribution of refractive index induced from the injection molding process. This index distribution is then reflected onto CODE $V^{(R)}$ simulation and used to calculate ray paths in inhomogeneous media. The proposed tracing scheme is implemented on the tracing of an aspheric lens for a mobile phone camera module.
