Xeryon's Piezo Motors Move in Nanometres and Hold Position Without Power

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Xeryon’s Piezo Motors Move in Nanometres and Hold Position Without Power

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Belgian company Xeryon, a 2013 spin-off from KU Leuven, builds ultrasonic piezo actuators for microscopes, lasers and chipmaking tools. Its motors vibrate about 100,000 times a second, position parts with encoder resolution down to 5 nanometres, and produce no magnetic field.

Some machines need to move parts by just a few nanometres, and a Belgian company called Xeryon builds the motors that make this possible.

Xeryon was spun out of KU Leuven in 2013 and makes piezo actuators for microscopes, lasers, medical devices and chipmaking tools.

Its motors use a piezoceramic element, a material that changes shape slightly when voltage is applied, driven at around 100,000 vibrations per second.

That vibration moves the contact point in a small elliptical path, and each cycle pushes a ceramic rod forward by a tiny amount while an encoder tracks its exact position.

On Xeryon’s linear stages, that resolution goes down to 5 nanometres, while a sheet of paper is about 100,000 nanometres thick.

This solves a real problem. Electromagnetic motors create magnetic fields, generate heat and need power to hold their position, which can disturb instruments like electron microscopes. Older piezo motors avoided magnets but were slow, noisy and wore out quickly.

Xeryon’s motors produce no magnetic field, lock in place when the power is off, and its smallest actuators, just 5.9 millimetres wide, can move at over one metre per second.

The company says over 2,000 customers now use them, including Applied Materials, Samsung and Thermo Fisher Scientific.

2 months ago

Innovation

Xeryon's Piezo Motors Move in Nanometres and Hold Position Without Power

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