  Precision motion stages are an essential part of a wide range of
manufacturing equipment, and their motion performance are critical to the
quality and throughput of the systems. The drastically increasing demand for
higher manufacturing throughput in various processes necessities the
development of next-generation motion systems with reduced moving weight and
high control bandwidth. However, the reduction of moving stage's weight can
lower the stage's structural resonance frequencies, making the hardware
dynamics and controller design problem strongly coupled. Aiming at this
challenge, this paper proposes a new formulation of nested hardware and control
co-design framework for precision motion stages. The proposed framework
explicitly optimizes the closed-loop control bandwidth with guaranteed
robustness, and explicitly considers the limits in the physical system. Two
case studies, including a motivating example using lumped-parameter mechanical
system and a finite-element-simulated lightweight motion stage, are being used
to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed nested CCD framework. Simulation
results show that the proposed nested CCD framework has 42\% of weight
reduction and 28\% bandwidth improvement compared with a sequential design
baseline, which demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed approach.
