Physik Instrumente (PI) introduced a new family of automated alignment engines for silicon photonics applications, including: three to six axis mechanisms; controllers with firmware based alignment algorithms; and the software tools to meet the high-accuracy demands of various markets, such as packing, planar testing, or inspection.
Highly stiff stacked multi-axis systems and parallel-kinematic six degrees of freedom systems with high speed and high throughput achieve alignment times of less than one second for single and double-sided alignment tasks, with all axes driven by one controller or one software interface using one global coordinate system. Interdependencies of axes are automatically compensated for, and integrated coarse-fine solutions deliver 25mm closed-loop motion and 100μm high-speed, piezo-flexure based nano-align motion in X, Y and Z. Longer linear travel ranges are also possible.