Manufacturing technologies toward extreme precision

Precision is one of the most important aspects of manufacturing. High precision creates high quality, high performance, exchangeability, reliability, and added value for industrial products. Over the past decades, remarkable advances have been achieved in the area of high-precision manufacturing technologies, where the form accuracy approaches the nanometer level and surface roughness the atomic level. These extremely high precision manufacturing technologies enable the development of high-performance optical elements, semiconductor substrates, biomedical parts, and so on, thereby enhancing the ability of human beings to explore the macro- and microscopic mysteries and potentialities of the natural world. In this paper, state-of-the-art high-precision material removal manufacturing technologies, especially ultraprecision cutting, grinding, deterministic form correction polishing, and supersmooth polishing, are reviewed and compared with insights into their principles, methodologies, and applications. The key issues in extreme precision manufacturing that should be considered for future R&D are discussed.