Performance analysis and experiment validation of a pneumatic vibration isolator

A performance analysis and experiment validation of a pneumatic vibration isolator (PVI) that applied in the wafer stage of lithography is proposed in this work. The wafer stage of lithography is a dual-stage actuator system, including a long-stroke stage (LS) and a short-stroke stage (SS). In order to achieve the nanometer level positioning the isolator is designed to reduce the transmission of LS excitations to SS. In addition, considering the SS with six degrees of freedom and required to keep a strict constant temperature environment the isolator need to have two functions, including the decoupling for vertical to horizontal and gravity compensation. In this isolator, a biaxial hinge was designed to decouple vertical rotation freedom, and a gas bearing was designed to decouple horizontal motion. The stiffness and damping of the pneumatic vibration isolator were analyzed. Besides, an analysis of the natural frequency and vibration transmissibility of the isolator is presented. In the end, the results show that vibration transmission is reduced significantly by the isolator and natural frequency can be lower than 0.6 Hz. This means that experimental results accord with the prediction model.