DESIGN AND CALIBRATION OF A PARALLEL-MOVING DISPLACEMENT GENERATOR FOR NANO-METROLOGY

A displacement generator is realized which enables the calibration of a wide variety of displacement-measuring probes, such as probes of rou ndness testers, roughness testers and stand-alone type scanning probe microscopes (SPMs), in the range of 12 mu m with a standard uncertaint y below 1 nm. A digital piezo translator (DPT) drives a flat mirror wh ich serves as the calibration platform. This mirror is locked to an el astic, hysteresis-free, monolithic parallel guide. Calibration of the platform displacement is carried out by various methods including tuna ble and stabilized lasers, Fabry-Perot interferometry and laser interf erometry. The system is calibrated with a standard uncertainty of abou t 0.1 nm using three independent methods. As an example the calibratio n of an SPM using 0.5 mu m generated steps is shown.