Development of MEMS-based micro capacitive tactile probe

In this paper, a micro capacitive sensor with nanometer resolution is presented for ultra-precision measurement of micro components, which is fabricated by the MEMS （micro electromechanical systems） non-silicon technique. Based on the sensor, a micro capacitive tactile probe is constructed by stylus assembly and packaging design for dimension metrology on micro/nano scale, in which a data acquiring system is developed with AD7747. Some measurements of the micro capacitive tactile probe are performed on a nano positioning and measuring machine （NMM）. The measurement results show good linearity and hysteresis with a range of 11.6 μm and resolution of better than 5 nm. Hence, the micro capacitive tactile probe can be integrated on NMM to realize measurement of micro structures with nanometer accuracy.