  Micro/Nano-positioning stages are of great importance in a wide range of
manufacturing machines and instruments. In recent years, the drastically
growing demand for higher throughput and reduced power consumption in various
IC manufacturing equipment calls for the development of next-generation
precision positioning systems with unprecedented acceleration capability while
maintaining exceptional positioning accuracy and high control bandwidth.
Reducing the stage's weight is an effective approach to achieving this goal.
However, the reduction of stages' weight tends to decrease its structural
resonance frequency, which limits the closed-loop control bandwidth and can
even cause stability issues. Aiming to overcome the aforementioned challenge
and thus create new lightweight precision stages with substantially improved
acceleration capability without sacrificing stage control performance, this
research presents a novel sequential structure and control design framework for
lightweight stages with low-frequency flexible modes of the stage being
actively controlled. Additional actuators and sensors are placed to actively
control the flexible structural dynamics of the lightweight stage to attain
high control bandwidth. A case study is simulated to evaluate the effectiveness
of the proposed approach, where a stage weight reduction of 24% is demonstrated
compared to a baseline case, which demonstrates the potential of the proposed
design framework. Experimental evaluation of the designed stage's motion
performance will be performed on a magnetically levitated linear motor platform
for performance demonstration.
