Stefan Vorndran

[email protected]

Phone: 508-832-3456

Stefan Vorndran is VP of marketing at PI (Physik Instrumente; Auburn, MA).

FIGURE 1. By the end of the decade, 100,000 satellites may orbit Earth.

Software & Accessories

Fast steering mirrors manipulate light for free-space optical communications and beyond

Stefan Vorndran

Oct. 28, 2024

Highly precise fast steering mirrors are essential to keep the optical signal between satellite transmitters and receivers aligned to ensure stable and efficient communication...

FIGURE 1. Aligning parts that have become misaligned because of stress, creep, or settling processes is an application for active shims, when submicron or even nanometer precision and stability are required.

Positioning, Support & Accessories

Motion Control: Active piezo shims improve precision of optical assemblies

Mathias Bach

Nov. 1, 2018

Because of the down-to-nanometer-range resolution of their piezo elements, active shims cover applications in precision engineering and alignment of optical components.

FIGURE 1. Silicon photonics couplings often deviate from clean predictable Gaussian coupling cross-section. Profiles of this sort cannot be reliably optimized with traditional alignment algorithms. Otherwise, the optimization risks locking onto one of the local optima rather than the global optimum. This can be efficiently achieved by performing an areal scan of the target area, thereby mapping the coupling cross-section across its full extent. A piezo-based scanner can achieve this in fractions of a second.

Positioning, Support & Accessories

Positioning: Silicon photonics manufacturing requires parallelism in alignment processes

Scott Jordan

Oct. 13, 2017

To make silicon photonics devices profitably at scale, automation subsystems require alignment processes that support steps from device characterization at the wafer level to ...