To ensure accurate linear travel, the stages use thermally matched, hardened-steel, crossed-roller bearings and high-precision reference surfaces. The result is a line of translation stages that offers an angular deviation of < 150 µrad in any axis and straight-line accuracy better than 3 microns as well as high load capacity and stiffness. Crossed Roller Bearings offer all of the advantages of ball bearings with higher load capacity and higher stiffness. This is a consequence of replacing the point contact of a ball with the line contact of a roller. Due to the averaging characteristics of line contacts, angular and linear deviations are generally below those found in ball bearings.

Our Picomotor actuators have a step size of < 30 nm, allowing for very small, controlled movements of the crossed-roller bearing linear stage.  The step size is dependent on the load with higher loads allowing for smaller minimum incremental motion.

Our Open-Loop Picomotor controllers and drivers are modular. You can daisy-chain up to 31 drivers together with four channels each, so you can have a network of up to 124 standard Picomotor actuators. You have two interface options with the controller system: hand pad or computer, both providing plug-and-play use. Alternatively, you may choose to use our TTL/Analog Picomotor driver.