<title>Advances and technologies of galvanometer-based optical scanners</title>

This paper will introduce the benefits, operating ranges and recent advances in galvanometer technology for scanning applications. Several different actuator and position detector technologies and designs will be presented. This will include moving iron, moving coil and moving magnet actuators along with several capacitive and optical position detector designs that offer positioning speed as fast as 150 micro-seconds and positioning repeatability/resolution to a single microradian. The performance and system design trade- offs that one should consider during the selection of the appropriate galvanometer technology and the optical systems design will be discussed along with a performance comparison of the galvanometer to other optical scanning technologies.