Optimal design of a flexure hinge-based XYZ atomic force microscopy scanner for minimizing Abbe errors

Abstract

To establish of standard technique of nanolength measurement in a two-dimensional plane, a new (AFM) system has been designed. In this system, measurement uncertainty is dominantly affected by the Abbe error of the XYZ scanning stage. No linear stage is perfectly straight; in other words, every scanning stage is subject to tilting, pitch, and yaw motion. In this article, an AFM system with minimum offset of XYZ sensing is designed. And, the XYZ scanning stage is designed to minimize the rotation angle because Abbe errors occur through the multiply of offset and rotation angle. For XY stage, optimal design is performed to minimize the rotation angle by maximizing the stiffness ratio of motion direction to the parasitic motion direction of each stage. For the Z stage, the optimal design of maximizing the first-resonant frequency is performed. When the resonant frequency increases, the scan speed is improved, thereby reducing errors caused by sensor drift. This article describes the procedures of selecting parameters for the optimal design. The full range of the XYZ scanner is 100μm×100μm×10μm. Based on the solution of the optimization problem, the XYZ scanner is fabricated. And tilting, pitch, and yaw motion are measured by autocollimator to evaluate the performance of XY stage.