A large-stroke planar 2-DOF flexure-based positioning stage for vacuum environments

The growing demand from industry for high-precision systems introduces new challenges for positioning mechanisms. High accuracy and repeatability down to the sub-micron scale are not uncommon. This is often combined with extreme environments, like high UV light sources, electron beams or vacuum. This article focuses on the flexure mechanism for a largestroke planar XY-positioning system. Applications for such a flexure mechanism can be found in for example lithography, micromachining or microscopy.