Alio Industries has been a longtime collaborator and systems integrator for New Way products. Now our off the shelf Boxway Air Slides form the basis for their industry leading 6D Nano Precision Systems, thanks to their non contact motion, submicron accuracy and cleanroom compatibility.
Here at New Way Air Bearings ®, we’re proud to work with a wide array of end users and systems integrators, both large and small. Among these are Alio Industries, who expanded from humble beginnings into an industry leading firm specializing in precision motion across metrology, life sciences and semiconductor production, with numerous patents held for their revolutionary Hexapod technology. For their air bearing systems product line, Alio turned to New Way, which began a decade-long partnership to develop the best possible motion systems for the most demanding applications.
Alio Industries, based out of Alvada, Colorado, has been an industry leader in nanometer precision motion, quality control, and systems integration since their founding in 2001. In 2009 they achieved a world first, developing an air bearing lift state, with motion repeatability below 10 nanometers. Now as an established shop for both off the shelf and custom solutions, Alio integrates a wide array of New Way porous media air bearings for their complete lineup of air bearing based stages.
Potential customers and systems integrators often assume that fully bespoke products will be required to mesh New Way technology for their existing assemblies, and while we’re happy to put our custom design department to work, this often isn’t the case. Alio’s revolutionary Planar XY Air Bearing stages use our off the shelf Boxway Linear Slides, our widest stage designed to accommodate heavy loadings. When combined with Alio’s linear direct drivers, the end result is a system with up to and over 3 meters of travel and less than 100nm of bi-directional repeatability. These air bearing based systems are now widely deployed in numerous industries, for applications including:
Alio Industries defines 6-D Nano Precision ® as “Precision [referring] to documented proof of performance at or below the +/- 450 nm level. 6-D Nano Precision® means the documented proof of performance over all 6 degrees of freedom of a body in motion at the nanometer level of precision.” For motion positioning at the nanoscale level, only porous media is capable of meeting these requirements. Since porous media air bearings have zero dynamic rolling elements, there is no internal inertia to cause over/undershoot. This is not simply a selling point or catch phrase, but a well studied phenomenon by academic collaborators at MIT, which found air bearings produce an order of magnitude reduction in motion error when compared to contact alternatives.
The Product Line
Boxway Linear Slides and Alio Industries Air Bearing Stages can be purchased in varying sizes, and may be purchased directly through New Way on this website, or via one of our distributors or systems integrators.