If you can't measure it, you can't make it

With the increasing growth in nano- and microscale investigation and manufacturing applications it is becoming even more important to be able to measure what is produced.

"If you can't measure it then you can't make it" becomes even more of a truism.

To this end Armstrong Optical has introduced a new measurement and manipulation system from Sios Messtechnik into the UK.

The NMM-1 system is able to offer 0.1nm resolution within a measurement envelope of 25x25x5mm.

The high measurement accuracy is a function of using three fibre-coupled frequency stabilised HeNe laser interferometers plus a zero Abbe error measurement arrangement.

A number of contact and non-contact measurement probes are available for the NMM-1 offering wide application flexibility.

Currently a fixed-focus sensor and an AFM can be simply interfaced onto the measurement platen.

For the future a nano-CMM probe is being evaluated to offer true 3D measurement capability.

Application areas for the NMM-1 include positioning, manipulation, processing, and measurement of objects in the fields of micromechanics, microelectronics, optics, molecular biology and precision engineering; large area raster scanning microscopy; calibration of step heights and lateral standards with measurement uncertainties of less than 1nm.

The NMM-1 is in use at the PTB in Germany (the German equivalent of the UK's National Physical Laboratory, NPL) as well as in laboratories and commercial operations in the USA and Asia.