Precision engineering

Precision engineering is a subdiscipline of electrical engineering, software engineering, electronics engineering, mechanical engineering, and optical engineering concerned with designing machines, fixtures, and other structures that have exceptionally low tolerances, are repeatable, and are stable over time. These approaches have applications in machine tools, MEMS, NEMS, optoelectronics design, and many other fields.

One of the fundamental principles in precision engineering is that of determinism. System behavior is fully predictable even to nanometer-scale motions. To do the job efficiently and correct you need modern machinery.

"The basic idea is that machine tools obey cause and effect relationships that are within our ability to understand and control and that there is nothing random or probabilistic about their behavior. Everything happens for a reason and the list of reasons is small enough to manage." - Jim Bryan

"By this we mean that machine tool errors obey cause-and-effect relationships, and do not vary randomly for no reason. Further, the causes are not esoteric and uncontrollable, but can be explained in terms of familiar engineering principles." - Bob Donaldson

Professors Hiromu Nakazawa and Pat McKeown provide the following list of goals for precision engineering:

 This article incorporates public domain material from the National Institute of Standards and Technology website http://www.nist.gov.

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