Hello, and welcome to another edition of vibrations I'm your host, Taylor ringgold, and we have two awesome guests to talk about a great topic first. West Wigglesworth was the product manager of T and C. We also have Neil Fitzgibbon, who is a senior business development manager at Taylor Hobson. Gentlemen, Thank you so much for joining me today. You're very welcome. Thank you for having me and I'm looking forward to the conversation. Yes, Thank you very much, Taylor. Always up for an opportunity to talk about our exciting products. All right. So let's talk about these amazing products. And Neil, to start with you. So the woofer scan 850 HD. Tell the people exactly what this thing can do and how important is it to this industry? Yes, that's a very good question. The 850 was, again, always a game changer in optical metrology. It set new or broken boundaries and the limitations that were previously there. It's a big instrument. It's capable of measuring optics from as small as 1 millimeter up to 850 millimeter in diameter, which is a pretty challenging requirement for any instrument. And as well as that, it can also handle low variations between a few grams, up to 350 kilos. So that makes it it's a very challenging instrument to be able to support as this from a structural point of view as well. But certainly it's opening new doors to optics manufacturers that can now measure bigger parts. There's more versatility. And we're getting levels of accuracy that previously were only available on instrument for metric type measurements. So it's a bit of a game changer. One of the things that's unique about it in terms of the support and the vibration control is that we really worked from the ground up and focused not only on the supporting the granite with pneumatic isolators, which are historically very good isolators for high frequency. But we also understood that there would be a low frequency component to this that needed to be addressed. In designing a solution to address both. We have two stages of isolation, which is critical, particularly when you hear anything nanometer scale. With this instrument, it's also the only thing that was important to understand when we were approaching this was the size, you know, just the overall size of the instrument and the weight of the instrument. It's very large scale, as Neil said, can work on very large pieces as well as well as very small. So we needed to be able to scale up to that with a system that would support that payload from a capacity standpoint, as well as work down to very, very low frequencies and very, very low input coming from the floor because it's very sensitive to vibration at all frequencies and the very smallest of vibration coming from a building or from a floor. Neil why did tell hops and why did they choose to work with TMC to design the vibration system? Why didn't you? They just do it on your own. And another good question. I think it was important that we tend to be experts in operational control. Obviously, you know, we've worked with teams in the past and as Wes said, this instrument, by virtue of the size of the instrument, the weight and the variety of loads that it needed to accommodate, as well as those loads being dynamic as well, i.e. there's moving base on all of these isn't a real challenge when it comes to a structure that is supported with anti vibration mounts or a platform that can handle it. But equally, the instrument is incredibly sensitive, as was said to down up to on a metric level vibrations and it was a very valuable working relationship. We knew that if we went to them, then we had a look at what we I need to understand them and come back with a solution. So they made a lot of sense to work with the teams they watched. When you heard that they were coming to you guys for help and to get this role to figure out the right design for the vibration system. How did you how did you feel? How did you feel exactly to work together with such company like taylor? First of all, I think they made the right choice. TMC started in the vibration control business back in the 70s and we've been working with engineers and scientists to design precision instruments, really the world's most precision instruments that are used in a various number of applications. And you know, Taylor Hobson has always been a leader, particular with optical based instrumentation. So, you know, if you go back over time, we typically are dealing with a lot of instrumentation that use electron beams and optical instruments, you know, have historically not been as sensitive to very low frequency vibration. But we know that, you know, as time goes on, these instruments, the demands of these instruments just continue to increase. So, you know, interferometry and optical based instruments, they're just getting more and more sensitive and also. Well, looking down to resolve a much smaller a smaller geometry. And that's the case with so many different applications, whether it be, you know, chip manufacturing, semiconductor chip manufacturing or optics or micro molecular biology, things like that. So so it's really exciting to work on an instrument that Taylor Hobson is designing because it was somewhat new to us. But we completely understand the challenges because all the challenges are, are very similar, you know, high payloads, very low input coming from the floor, low free, you know, not just low frequency vibration cancellation, but, you know, cancellation over a wide bandwidth of frequencies because it's not just the floor but you know, the instrument self has a frame and has resonances. And you have to know how to deal with that in addition to what's going on up on the payload, because there's moving parts in the payload that you have to understand and address. So, so yeah, it was a great opportunity for us to, to work together to develop this next generation cutting edge solution. You know, you even mentioned the challenges that can go along with such a project like this. And I think that's what makes a good product at the end of the day, right when there's not every revolutionary product has an easy route to making the product. And I think that's just part of the story of how you guys work together to make such a product like this. Neil, this question is for you. What would happen if you didn't control vibration if you can tell the people what exactly that could do for the product you have and just know, the overall question. Yeah, I mean, it would be it would have a catastrophic effects on our measurement. And I guess to put it in context, the instrument just the back of the instrument works by rotating an optic and then we measure with the non-contact program, we spiral across the surface of the optic. So we essentially scan that whole surface. Now, when you're measuring very small parts, the measurement side is very, very short, as you can imagine when you're measuring 850 with two diameter parts. The measurement cycle is significantly longer. So therefore, if you've got environmental impact, you could be very sensitive to environmental impacts, such as vibrations, because any fluctuations in the instrument transmit directly through to the probes which are on long arms, et cetera and this will then come through in the measurement. And what's important is when we give our customers a measurement result on our instrument, we have to be as sure. And as confident as possible that what they are seeing is a result of the surface that has been measured and not a result of the environment around it. So if we are getting a lot of especially low frequency vibrations coming through in the measurements, taking 10 minutes, 15 minutes that can put what we would call mid spatial frequencies into the measurement. That could actually be a manufacturing error. And we don't want to find the potential to mess or add EVAs that aren't actually there on the part. So we need to be sure when we're measuring or we're measuring the surface. And we're not actually giving any results that include anything else in this case, hydration. So it's absolutely critical that we remove a lot of the vibrations as is critical to the instrument. And that's where I think we've been calling it a double stacked system was obviously got a better name for that. But the combination of the two different types of anti moderation platform allowed us to remove all of the frequencies that we needed to or what potentially could potentially impact our measurement accuracy. How hard is it to keep things? Almost you know, it's hard to. The word perfect is such an interesting word, right? Because nobody is perfect. But you have to be perfect, right? You have to be. You can't make one little mistake. How hard is it to not have a mistake like that? It's very hard. And I mean, we use perfect. You write it perfect. If everybody if we could be perfect, then we would be by far and away the market leaders. There'd be nobody else out there. But we have to get as close to perfect as possible. And it is a real challenge. And on an instrument at this level where we're measuring the diameter of 850 millimeters down to 100 nanometers format over the whole area, it's absolutely vital that we can eliminate all of the external factors that could impact that. We can handle the stuff that we do ourselves. And we know our technology from the method framework point of view. But that's why we need experts like TMC to come in and give us direction and support to get the past, you know, to the impact that we can't handle ourselves, you know, sometimes. I want to say this the right way. Sometimes companies like both you guys, you might not want to work together on certain things. You want to try doing it on your own. But when you could honestly tell you, you know, talk to yourself to like, hey, look, we do need help and TMZ is helping you so well. And so much worse. If you can talk about why original equipment manufacturers should work with TMZ to design certain products, because I'm hearing a lot of great things about what your company can do for Neil, but maybe you can tell more about what TMZ can actually do to others. Sure Yeah. So, you know, like I said, one of the things is that we've been doing this for a very long time. It's really a focus of ours. We have experts in the field of vibration control. And when we approach a project like this and designing an instrument or, you know, working with a company that's designing it's a precision instrument. You know, we gather we know the information that we need to gather. And, you know, it's more than just vibration sensitivity. Obviously, that's a main component. But it's important to also understand the, you know, the requirements of the instrument from a throughput standpoint to understand the parameters of the payload payloads can be very dynamic. They can be static as well. But a dynamic payload. I could have a moving stage that imparts very high forces on an isolation system. And if you choose the wrong isolation system with respect to the dynamics of the payload, it can really set you back not only in designing that instrument, but it could have impacts on the throughput of that instrument, which ultimately, you know, you need to have high throughput and high yields successfully without imperfections. You know, talking about being perfect but without imperfections in the measurement. So we understand a lot of these applications because we have worked on so many different types of applications, whether it be, you know, optical instruments or electron beam instruments, lithography tools, different instruments that are used not only in inspection, but also in precision machining, lithography tools that are used in I mentioned molecular biology earlier. So these are things like electron microscopes, very, very high power electron microscopes that are working down to smaller than nanometers Angstrom level resolution where. The very low frequency vibration cancellation is required, as well as higher, higher frequency isolation. And this, you know, we've referred to it a little bit, but it's two stages of isolation or a hybrid where it combines passive pneumatic isolation with active active vibration cancellation, too, to that's really the only way to achieve the level of performance that's required for these very high, highly sensitive instruments. You just mentioned the two stages of isolation. To tell, tell our viewers are. Is that always required? Well if you had asked me 15 to 20 years ago, I would say, well, well, not very often, but but today it's required more and more, more and more often. And the reason is because. You you have a pneumatic isolation, which is essentially an air spring, very, very good at attenuating vibration above a certain frequency. So like 10 Hertz. Typical machine vibration. A lot of different types of building vibration is mitigated with a pneumatic isolator. But it's above a certain frequency when you get down to low frequency vibration, which comes from footfall, just people walking through a building road, traffic outside, you know, automobiles, trains. There's a lot of low vibration input coming from up through the floor. And as these instruments get more and more sensitive from, you know, the resolving a smaller spot size, they get more and more sensitive to that low frequency vibration. And that's when that second stage of isolation is really required to work down to very low frequencies below 1 Hertz and input levels that certainly humans can't feel. But, you know, when you're talking about it's almost like I guess a good analogy is if you're, you know, looking for in Manhattan, you're from New York, so you're looking for an inch in Manhattan from a satellite, a similar kind of resolution or scale when you're talking about, you know, molecular biology and very low frequency and/or even, you know, today's chip manufacturing, 5 nanometer here, about 5 nanometer or a 3 nanometer process in the semiconductor industry. Well, it's very hard to find a defect in that if you're not, you know, particularly if you're not canceling very low frequency vibration. So that's the detail that I needed just for one simple question. That's why you guys are great, because I can ask one little question and then you guys can elaborate on and give some more details for the people that are viewing this. And my last question for the bulkiness is the same question for multi-zone. We'll start with you. When you guys are making this type of technology. And this is revolutionary technology, by the way. Everybody, anybody. How does this make you feel? And also, what do you see that could be like for the future of the industry that you're working in? And how beneficial is this piece of machinery and what you guys are doing? Because, you know. At the end of the day, you guys are making products for the future and to better the future of your industry. So how important is this product in general? I'd say the optics are changing in their uses, and they're becoming. I'd like to think obviously I'm biased, but it's probably one of the biggest growing areas of technology. And that's not just in your mobile phones, which have got obviously high, very high precision cameras in there. You know, it's your webcams, but it's up to, you know, internet satellites. The communication links and access to satellites are actually based around Mimi's optics, but it goes to another level. And that's what the changes that need to be measured now to give these new levels of technology, technology legs, if you like, they can't be measured easily by the existing optical technology that's out there. That's why at the beginning, when I said the iPhone is a game changer with the years, because the versatility means that the one instrument could measure almost an infinite number of different shapes of paths, whereas traditional technology would have meant you have one instrument specifically to measure a certain type of optic. So you can imagine that opens up doors to optical manufacturers to develop such a wide range of parts that could go into medical applications like, you know, the semiconductor applications that they're driving now. Automotive applications are massive, as you can imagine. Satellite communications telescopes, some of the activities that we've built so far are being used for telescope applications, but it's giving the industry the flexibility to evolve how they design optics, which in turn optimizes and increases the performance and increases the functions that we can get from which I think, you know, ultimately we all benefit from. So it really is an important instrument in the industry. And you know, certainly I can only see things getting bigger and more involved and we're going to have to work in partnership with instruments this size going up as the challenges come with companies like TMC. You know, one thing that's really exciting about being part of TMC is this evolution of vibration control. So, you know, I talked about pneumatic isolators and really when we first started designing solutions to go into machines for original equipment manufacturers, it was pneumatic springs, which is our Kimball piston isolator. And that was good enough because of the technology that it was supporting at the time. And people hear about Moore's law and, and and that alone has really driven the geometry of the semiconductor industry and the resolution of the instruments pushing continuing to get pushed to its limits. And the exciting thing about the low frequency vibration cancellation system, namely our space product, is that it was originally developed 20 years ago, almost before its time. And I would say over the past 10 years or so, it's really seen the applications that it was designed for because the resolution of these instruments continues to improve and get to, like I said, Angstrom level precision and I, you know, TMC really has a unique solution in this case is product because it's really the only commercially available solution using a photoelectric actuator and inertial sensors in this particular architecture, canceling very low frequency vibration designed to work specifically with tools that also require pneumatic isolation. Because really need both and you need to know how to combine the two. And it's just been exciting to see all these applications that need it. And we continue to work with so many different unique applications. Taylor Hobson is a great one. The loop was gaining 5850 has been one of these very exciting projects. And you know, we're not just standing by waiting for new applications. We continue to develop our technology, too, and to be able to work with exciting engineers and scientists. On the next generation. Technology is what is also a very exciting part of it. Well, West Neal, Thank you so much for joining me today. I learned a lot myself, and I know that people watching this have learned a lot as well. Appreciate your stopping by. My name is Taylor Ringgold and we will talk to you guys. OK Thanks to.
