News & Press

This year's European Photonics Industry Consortiums (EPIC) on the subject of "automation for manufacturing, packaging, and inspecting optoelectronic elements" meeting took place in PI's new technology center at the headquarters in Karlsruhe, Germany, from the 22^nd to 23^rd May 2018. The two-day event proved to be the ideal networking platform for a large number of photonics specialists from all over the world, who were interested in automating their high-precision production and inspection lines.

PI (Physik Instrumente) has successfully established itself on the market as solution supplier of high-precision positioning systems. Many of the positioning solutions that were originally developed for specific applications are part of today’s standard portfolio. A new clearly structured catalog with 300 pages now provides an overview of the broad range of standard industry-compliant motorized single- and multi-axis positioning solutions.

If a target or an actual dimension between two components inside precision machines changes, for instance in semiconductor manufacturing, measuring applications or inspection systems, readjustment may be necessary. An example of this would be when the machine is started up at the user's location, and initial settings, drifting or changes in tolerances need to be compensated after installation. The disadvantage of classical shims that are ground exactly to the required dimension, is that they need to be inserted mechanically. Furthermore, unlimited fine adjustment is not always possible and once the dimension has been fixed, it is often very difficult to change it afterwards. PI (Physik Instrumente) has found the perfect solution for this and developed the PIRest piezo-based "shims". Once they have been installed into the machine, the active shims not only make it possible to readjust the gap between two components at any time, but also achieve this with nanometer precision.

Air bearing positioning stages have proven themselves in a large number of applications, for instance, in metrology, when aligning optical fibers, in semiconductor manufacturing and wafer inspection, in precision scanning applications or positioning tasks in cleanrooms. The air bearings have a number of advantages compared to mechanical bearings. They operate without friction, there is no abrasion, the speed of vibration-free motion can be controlled exactly and repeatability is possible in the nanometer range.

With effect from March 1, Dr. Thomas Bocher has taken over the responsibility at PI (Physik Instrumente) for global business development in the field of Microscopy & Life Sciences. The creation of this new, strategic function in this growing segment is intended to support the PI Group in its systematic strategy for growth.

As part of the PIC conference, which takes place in Brussels on the 10th and 11th of April, innovative companies will be honored with the PIC-Award for products and solutions with highly integrated photonic circuits (PIC - photonic integrated circuits). Online voting is open to the public at picawards.net/vote until March 23 to decide who will be the winners in each of the various categories. The fast multi axis photonics alignment system from PI (Physik Instrumente) has been nominated for the final vote in the "Advances in Manufacturing" category.

PI Benelux is looking for two new dedicated colleagues! We would like to welcome an Account Manager High Tech Positioning Systems and Senior Account Manager High Tech to our team. 

To generate ultrasound oscillation, PI Ceramic offers optimized PICMA® Chip miniature multilayer piezo actuators for resonant, high dynamics operation.

Parallel-kinematic hexapods position in six degrees of freedom and they work with considerably more precision than is possible with serial, stacked systems. In automation systems, the space for integrating the hexapod is usually very limited and multi-shift operations require durable solutions. At the same time, the limited space often increases the risk of collisions; for example, when referencing is necessary after an emergency stop or a power failure and therefore needs to be moved back without being controlled. With the compact H-825 hexapod, PI (Physik Instrumente) now has the suitable positioning solution in its portfolio for these types of applications.