Design and analysis of a high-speed XYZ nanopositioning stage

This paper presents the design and analysis of a high-speed XYZ nanopositioning stage. The developed stage is composed of a parallel-kinematic XY stage and a Z stage which is nested within the end-effector of the XY stage. To achieve high resonance frequencies, four special flexure modules with large stiffness are employed for the XY stage. These modules are arranged symmetrically to reduce cross-coupling between X- and Y-axis. For the Z stage, a symmetrical leaf flexure parallelogram mechanism is adopted, which has high resonance frequencies and no cross-coupling. Static and dynamic analysis are performed respectively to establish analytical models for the developed XYZ stage. Based on these models, the dimensions of the stage are optimized to maximize the first resonance frequency of the X-and Y-axis. Then, finite-element analysis (FEA) is conducted to validate the performance of the developed XYZ nanopositioning stage. The FEA results reveal that the workspace of the stage is 9.2 μm × 9.2 μm × 3.1 pm and the first resonance frequencies of the stage in three axes are 7.3 kHz, 7.3 kHz and 46.2 kHz, respectively, which agrees with the analytical results.