High-speed vertical positioning stage with integrated dual-sensor arrangement

• A novel vertical positioning stage suitable for scanning probe microscopy is proposed.
• The vertical stage has a dual-sensor arrangement for vibration and tracking control.
• Closed-loop bandwidth of 11.4 kHz (50% of the first resonance frequency) is achieved.
• Closed-loop 6σ-resolution is 3.6 nm.

This article presents a novel vertical positioning stage with a dual-sensor arrangement suitable for scanning probe microscopy. The stage has a travel range of 8.4 μm and a first resonance frequency of 24 kHz in the direction of travel. The sensor arrangement consists of an integrated piezoelectric force sensor and laminated piezoresistive strain sensor. The piezoelectric force sensor exhibits extremely low noise and introduces a zero into the dynamics which allows the use of integral force feedback. This control method provides excellent damping performance and guaranteed stability. The piezoresistive sensor is used for tracking control with an analog PI controller which is shown to be an approximate inverse of the damped system. The resulting closed-loop system has a bandwidth is 11.4 kHz and 6σ-resolution of 3.6 nm, which is ideal for nanopositioning and atomic force microscopy (AFM) applications. The proposed vertical stage is used to replace the vertical axis of a commercial AFM. Scans are performed in constant-force contact mode with a tip velocity of 0.2 mm/s, 1 mm/s and 2 mm/s. The recorded images contain negligible artefacts due to insufficient vertical bandwidth.