Magnetic bearings use electromagnetic force to support the rotating shaft without any mechanical contact and actively control shaft vibration; hence, there is no mechanical friction and wear due to contact during the operation, and it has a semi-permanent lifespan. Because magnetic bearings are unstable by themselves, a gap sensor is necessary to stably control the position of objects. However, there is a limit to the improvement in control performance because the sensor is installed on one side of the bearing and is not aligned with the electromagnet. This paper presents a newly developed collocated eddy-current PCB displacement sensor for magnetic bearings. The PCB sensor is designed and built to install between the poles of a magnetic bearing and to minimize the electromagnetic interference. A sensor calibration test is performed to evaluate the sensitivity and noise of the collocated PCB sensor. In addition, the control performance of the collocated PCB sensor is evaluated by measuring the closed-loop sensitivity function of a 1 DOF magnetic suspension test rig. The collocated PCB sensor has noise within ±1 μm and excellent vibration suppression performance.

In mobile phone cameras, usually a voice coil motor (VCM) is used as a micro-positioning device for the image autofocus (AF) because of its low cost, simplicity, and reliability. Measuring the actual displacement of the VCM is important when we assemble the camera and test the AF performance for distant objects. In this paper, we propose using a confocal displacement sensor for calibrating the VCM displacement, where the axial chromatic aberration of a confocal objective lens is used to measure the target position. The tolerance angle for the dynamic tilt of a VCM increased up to ±15o because of the large numerical aperture of the confocal objective lens, which increased the stability of the repeatable in-line inspection. We compared the measurement robustness of the confocal displacement sensor with that of the laser displacement sensor in a mass production line to verify its performance superiority.