摘要 |
<p>Apparatus for measuring surfaces or profiles or textures comprises a grating interferometer comprising a curved grating (300) carried on a pivoted support arm (120,123) carrying at its other end a probe (130) for contact with a surface, biased into contact therewith by an electro-magnetic coil (410) acting on an armature (420), or a pair of such biasing means. A laser diode (310) illuminates the grating (300) to produce a pair of first order diffracted beams of opposite sign which are reflected from internal faces of a prism (316), and combined by a dichroic central layer thereof (335) and a pair of beam splitters (340a,340b). The output signals from the beam splitters are supplied to a signal processing circuit comprising a fringe counter (600) and an interpolator (700), the fringe counter detecting zero crossings of the signals and the interpolator (700) maintaining a digital estimate of the phase of the signals and updating the estimate when the phase difference between the estimate and the input signals exceeds a predetermined threshold. The interpolator comprises a digital counter (721) the output of which comprises the low order bits of the digital output signal for which the output of the fringe counter comprises the high order bits. <IMAGE></p> |