• Transactions of the Korean Society of Machine Tool Engineers
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.51-58
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• 2008

This paper presents a new design of the precision stage for the reticle in lithography process and a low hunting control method for the stage. The stage has three axes for X, Y, ${\theta}_z$ those actuated by three voice coil motors individually. The designed reticle stage system has three gap sensors and voice coil motors, and supported by four air bearings and the forward/inverse kinematics of the stage were solved to get an accurate reference position. When a stage is in regulating control mode, there always exist small fluctuations(stage hunting) in the stage movement. Because the low stage hunting characteristic is very important in recent lithography and nano-level applications, a special regulating controller for ultra low hunting is proposed in this paper. Also this research proposed the 2-step transmission system for preventing the noise infection from environmental devices. The experimental results showed the proposed regulating control system reduced hunting noise as 35nm(rms) when a conventional PID generates 77nm(rms) in the same mechanical system. Besides the reticle stage has 100nm linear accuracy and $1{\mu}rad$ rotation accuracy at the control frequency of 8kHz.