Development of High Precision Position Stage and its Performance

This paper presents a high precision position stage which has the movement range of 0.4 micrometer and 1 nanometer precision. The piezoelectric actuator stage is composed of vertical position control part and horizontal position control part. With the three vertical piezoelectric actuators and three horizontal piezoelectric actuators, the stage can adjust the position in three directions and three angles around. The simulation and experimental results show that the first natural frequencies of the stage in three directions are bigger than 400Hz with the 600kg load, which means that the system are very strong to satisfy the stiff requirement. To evaluate the performance of the precision stage, vertical and horizontal movement and resolution are experimented with capacitance type displacement sensor whose sensitivity is 0.1V/um. The results show the stage can satisfy the design requirement.