Development of a Parallel-Kinematic High-Speed XY Nanopositioning Stage

This paper presents a parallel-kinematic high-speed XY nano-positioning stage driven by piezoelectric stack actuators. With the purpose to achieve high resonance frequencies and a relatively large travel range, four special flexure modules are used to provide large stiffness. A symmetric configuration is adopted for the designed stage to reduce the cross-coupling between two axes and restrict parasitic motions as well. Static and dynamic analysis of the stage is performed respectively, and the dimensional optimization is carried out on the basis of static and dynamic models to maximize the first resonance frequency of the stage. Finite-element analysis (FEA) is utilized to confirm the effectiveness of the design. The FEA results show that the stage has good static and dynamic performances, which are well validated by the experiments. According to the experimental results, the stage is capable of a workspace of 11.2 mu mx11.6 mu m with positioning resolution of 3 nm. Besides, the resonance frequencies of the stage are over 13.6 kHz with the cross-coupling between two axes lower than -44 dB. It is clearly demonstrated that the stage has high resonance frequencies, relatively large travel range and nearly decoupled performance in two axes.