PI Introduces Compact Planar XY Air Bearing Stages At Photonics West

Nanopositioning industry leader PI (Physik Instrumente) L.P. will be showcasing the newly released A-311 PIglide IS Series compact, planar XY air bearing stage at SPIE Photonics West– the world’s largest conference on photonics related technologies. The stage is designed to deliver extremely precise and vibration-free motion, making it ideal for metrology, wafer inspection, laser marking, and other precision motion applications.

200+ Man Years of In-House Air Bearing Design Experience
PI designs and manufactures all air bearing products in the USA. PI’s engineering team has more than 200 man years of air bearing design experience. In addition to customized systems for OEMs, PI offers a substantial standard product line of air bearing stages that includes motorized and non-motorized, linear, rotary, spherical, X/XY, voice coil, compact, and large scale systems, as a complement to the existing comprehensive range of piezo nano positioning stages, traditional motorized positioners and hexapod 6-axis parallel positioning systems. The addition of air bearing technology puts PI in the unique position to cover the whole motion range from finger-tip sized nano-positioners to large scale stages with long travel ranges, through a plethora of different drives and guiding systems that can be tailored to meet the needs of an OEM or customer.

Air Bearings vs. Mechanical Bearings
Air bearings replace mechanical contact by a thin air film. The fully preloaded air bearings in the A-311 PIglide IS provide frictionless motion, resulting in negligible hysteresis or reversal error, and zero-wear of mechanical components. Due to the air bearing’s surface averaging effect, pitch/yaw/roll and straightness/flatness are significantly better than with conventional mechanical bearings, motion is vibration-free, and velocity can be controlled at very high constancy.

Watch Video
https://www.youtube.com/embed/_0frYXPpLEw?rel=0

Other Featured Products
PI, who was named a 2016 Photonics Prism Award finalist with its Fast Multi-Axis Photonics Alignment system, will also showcase innovative nanopositioning stages, piezo, voice coil and linear motors, hexapod 6-axis parallel positioning systems, beam steering and fiber alignment equipment. Talk to a PI Engineer at booth #4829.