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Lithography

instrumentation grade piezo ceramics, PI Ceramic has introduced many significant and award- winning reliability innovations. For example, piezo ceramics have been vulnerable to the ingress of water molecules along the layers from ambient humidity. This can limit the lifetime of conventional piezo actuators.

Until recently, unsatisfactory attempts to encapsulate the layered ceramics using polymer paint were the best technologies available. With PI’s patented PICMA actuators (Figure 6), all- ceramic encapsulation provided a significant leap forward, improving MTBF in humid conditions by approximately three orders of magnitude (Figure 7) .

Piezo lifetime can also be measured in cycles. Figure 8 shows a typical performance-consistency result in open-loop actuation of a PICMA actuator before and after more than a billion cycles. A PICMA actuator being tested for a space application is viewable online and has amassed 3.22x1012 cycles.

Having its own ceramics development and fabrication capabilities has resulted in other benefits besides improved reliability and consistency versus third-party piezo offerings. Importantly, the ability to partner with companies with demanding needs, like TMC, is greatly facilitated by PI’s ability to innovate in piezo ceramics.

The ability to develop entirely new concepts in piezo ceramic actuation is also of significant import, with novel developments like PI’s patented all-ceramic NEXACT actuators (Figure 9), which provide 20 millimetres of travel with a high, 10N

Figure 7. PICMA’s patented construction improves MTBF by approximately three orders of magnitude in humid conditions, versus conventional polymer-encapsulated construction

push-pull force, power-off position hold capability and resolution to 0.03nm – ideal for sensitive alignment applications such as nanoimprint lithography.

Conclusion

Two innovative industry leaders teamed up to solve not only challenging present day problems but to pave the way for the next generations of some of the world’s most important industrial processes. With STACIS, tool and facilities engineers concerned with vibration isolation in the face of Moore’s Law’s unceasing demands can take a rest. And STACIS’ new, smaller form factors will prove to be enablers for a diverse array of new fields ranging from optical tweezers to nanomaterial studies.

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Figure 8. Open-loop piezo actuator motion characteristics remain highly consistent after more than a billion cycles

Figure 9. NEXACT is an example of piezoceramic innovation, providing 20mm travel with 0.03nm resolution and 10N force

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