• Journal of the Korean Society of Manufacturing Technology Engineers
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.756-760
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• 2011

This paper proposed an alignment stage driven by piezo actuators for alignment process of a contact-type lithography. Among contact-type lithography processes, an UV-curable nanoimprint process is an unique process to be able to align patterns on upper and lower layers. An alignment stage of the UV-curable nanoimprint process requires nano-level resolution as well as high stiffness to overcome friction force due to contact moving. In this paper, the alignment stage consists of a compliant mechanism using flexure hinges, piezo actuators for high force generation, and capacitive sensors for high-resolution measurement. The compliant mechanism is implemented by four prismatic-prismatic compliant chains for two degree-of-freedom translations. The compliant mechanism is composed of flexure hinges with high stiffness, and it is directly actuated by the piezo actuators which increases the stiffness of the mechanism, also. The performance of the ultra-precision stage is demonstrated by experiments.