Integration of COTS components with a DSP coprocessor for microstereolithography machine control

Prototyping is a process of building pre-production models of a product to test various aspects of its design. Stereolithography (STL) is a rapid prototyping technique that allows us to quickly produce physical prototypes with the important benefit of reducing the time-to-market. The resulting design cost will be decreased considerably. Usually it has only an average precision of about 200 /spl mu/m and the machines are built of particularly expensive components. The paper presents an approach for the integration of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components with a PCI bus digital signal processor board for complete control of a highly precise microstereolithography machine. Two scanners and one acoustooptical modulator that are directly controlled by the DSP realize the deflection and switching of the laser beam. The main goal is to ensure real-time data flow throughout the whole process of exposure so that no missing coordinates or "hot spots" occur. During the development, we focused on the use of standard programming languages like C and C++, standard operating systems like Windows NT and hardware components for the well-introduced PCI bus. These endeavors lead to our prototype of a microstereolithographry machine that is suitable for the growing needs of the microsystem technology industry.