PI’s high-speed, direct-drive rotation stages are equipped with frictionless, brushless, closed-loop torque motors. These fast rotary tables provide the best combination of high accuracy, high velocity, and maximum service life. PI provides closed-loop direct drive rotary tables with both mechanical bearings and air bearings. Stage models with large apertures and low profile are available. The stage design is optimized for high speed, stiffness, and high load capacity. If completely friction-free and maintenance free motion with virtually unlimited lifetime is required, air bearing rotation tables are recommended. These ultra-precision, high-speed rotary tables provide vibration-free motion with extremely high accuracy and negligible runout, wobble and eccentricity errors. The lack of lubricants makes these also clean room compatible and ideal for any high-performance metrology application in optics, photonics, and semiconductor manufacturing, test and metrology related projects.
Advantages of Motorized Direct-Drive Rotation Stages: Speed, Precision, Reliability
In contrast to worm gear driven rotary stages or belt-drive rotation stages, the fast, direct-drive stages eliminate play in gears, couplings or flex in drive belts, providing precise rotary motion with zero backlash and excellent constancy of velocity, while achieving higher speed than worm-gear drives.
Applications for Direct-Drive, High-Speed Rotation Stages
High-speed rotary tables are often used in high performance factory automation, semiconductor, and laser processing applications and research. Due to the use of brushless, high-torque motors with direct metrology position feedback, backlash is completely eliminated, and reliability is greatly improved.
What’s the difference between a Rotary Table and Rotary Stage?
Basically there is no difference. With larger models, a table is used more often, while smaller size models are often called stages.
What Angular Positioning Resolution can be Achieved?
With modern direct-metrology rotary encoders, sensor resolution down to 1/100th of a microrad is available on select models with large rotary table platforms, using the high interpolation factors modern closed-loop brushless motor controllers such as PI’s EtherCat based controllers provide.
Based on the high encoder resolution and powerful servo controllers, the direct-drive rotary tables also provide excellent velocity control, which is required in automation applications including high-speed laser processing, indexing, and semiconductor wafer inspection.
Most Direct Drive Rotation stages can be mounted horizontally and vertically, and with combinations all 3 rotary degrees of freedom (3DOF, pitch, yaw, and roll) can be addressed.
V-610 High Precision Rotation Stage
Direct Drive, Direct Encoder
- 25mm aperture, 100mm turn table
- 27µrad min. inc. motion
- 540°/sec max. velocity
- 2kg load
- Torque motor, sine/cosine encoder
- Optional brake
V-611 High Precision Rotation Stage
Direct Drive, Absolute Encoder Option
- 35mm aperture, 100mm turn table
- 1µrad min. inc. motion
- 2880°/sec max. velocity
- 10kg load
- Torque motor
- Sine/cosine or absolute encoder
V-62x Ultra-High Precision Rotation Stages
Direct Drive, Absolute Encoder Option
- 85/110mm turn table
- 0.0015µrad max resolution
- 7200°/sec max. velocity
- 15kg load
- Torque motor
- Sine/cosine or absolute encoder
A-621 - A-627 Air Bearing Rotary Stages
Direct Drive, High Load
- 2/4/6/8/12” table diameter
- 13 to 420kg load
- 0.008µrad max. resolution
- 40 to 100nm flatness
- 500 to 2500 RPM max.
A-634 – A-638 Air Bearing Rotary Stages
Low Profile, Large Diameter
- 6/8/14” table diameter
- 20/32/60/120kg load capacity
- 0.03µrad max. resolution
- <100nm eccentricity & flatness
- 500 RPM max.
- Self-locking option at rest
A-688 Air Bearing Rotary Stage
Large Clear Aperture
- ⌀260mm clear aperture
- 77kg load capacity
- 0.0015µrad max. resolution
- 500 RPM max.
- Flatness/Eccentricity <175/300nm
- Wobble: < 1µrad
- Direct drive
