Welcome to Oriental Motor's "Engineering Notes" Blog:

Learn more about Oriental Motor's compact and easy-to-use small industrial robots, robot controllers, and software.

The popularity of micro linear actuators has been steadily increasing, driven by the need to increase productivity in confined spaces.  To help meet the demand of the miniaturization trend, Oriental Motor has developed a compact linear actuator that can be attached to an off-the-shelf stepper motor.

Wafers are the foundation of semiconductor chip manufacturing. The growing demand for semiconductors, driven by technological advancements like AI, IoT, and robotics, makes it crucial to handle these delicate wafers efficiently and precisely.  In this article, we will explain how unified features from a family of motors and actuators can simplify process automation for semiconductor wafers.

Oriental Motor provides a wide variety of products to meet semiconductor equipment design goals.  This post focuses on motor selection for two specific motion axes of a semiconductor manufacturing process called CMP (Chemical Mechanical Polishing) and explains how to save time by using different products from the same family.

Robotics automation can be easier to build than you think.  Here's an example of how a 5-axis SCARA robot can be built in-house with off-the-shelf products.

Robots are increasing in demand due to continuing labor shortages and the push for error-less efficiency in manufacturing.  In the meantime, other companies are falling behind because they either do not have the capital or engineering know-how to implement robotics automation.  While you can buy a robot and pay someone else to program it to do what you want, building and programming your own robot can be easier than you think.

Servo motor systems are expensive but great for demanding applications that require high speed, peak torque, or feedback.  Stepper motors are cost-effective but do not offer the peace of mind of feedback.  For designs that do not need the bells and whistles of servo motor systems, there is another option.

In this post, we introduce a real-world SCARA and cartesian/gantry robot example of in-house automation built using our AlphaStep AZ Series family of motors, actuators, drivers, and our 4-axis robot controller.