Involved in the motion control industry for almost 20 years, Korte was named president/managing director of Heidenhain Corp., the North American subsidiary of Dr. Johannes Heidenhain GmBH (Traureut, Germany) in 1989. Korte's experience with electronics began in the Air Force in 1971, and he has focused his career on helping to educate engineers about linear and rotary encoder technology, authoring many technical papers on behalf of Heidenhain.

Do you need to move faster, more accurately, and with higher reliability? If so, you may have a need for motion control.

Design News: You've been in the motion control industry for the past two decades. What is the biggest change you have seen?

Korte: Technology-wise, one of the biggest trends was the move to digital speed control, which began several years ago. These newer systems take advantage of a full digital solution to velocity control and position feedback. However, I think the biggest trend we're seeing today is with the broadening of applications for the technology. Machine tools have been the mainstay of this industry for years, and it is still a very important market for us. But now we're seeing a rather dynamic growth in such industries as electronics, graphics, food processing, and general storage media.

Q: How big is the market for motion control?

A: It's difficult to say, because when you talk about feedback products it's such a huge market, encompassing every possible device from resolvers to high- end systems. Heidenhain, for example, offers everything from a $70 device to devices costing more than $10,000. In total, there are probably hundreds of millions of motion control products out there, and the market is growing at a phenomenal rate.

Q: What is driving this market growth?

A: As engineers design equipment to go faster and operate more accurately, they are finding that they can no longer get by with open-loop systems--they need some sort of feedback. When you think about it that way, it's easy to see that there are market opportunities in every application in which something moves. And as the stakes in product performance are continually being raised, I don't see any slowdown in the market.

Q: How do I know as a design engineer if I need some type of feedback system?

A: If you're currently using an open feedback solution, the question to ask yourself is, "Do I need to move faster, more accurately, and/or with higher reliability?" If the answer in any of those cases is yes, then there may be a need to look at motion control.

Q: What should I be looking for in a supplier of motion control products?

A: The key is to find a supplier who is willing to come in and sit down and really work with you to develop the best motion control solution for your application. The demands on today's engineers are enormous--they have to be bearing experts, motor experts, motion control experts, and so on. We as a company have made a commitment to share our expertise with our customers--we have some engineers who have been working with feedback products for more than 20 years, and that's really where we excel. For every new application, we have already been confronted by similar applications, and we really pride ourselves on our ability to help the customer identify the right solution.

Q: What is the biggest challenge in growing the market?

A: We've been in such an upscale growth mode that our biggest challenge is figuring out how to respond fast enough to the demand. But seriously, I think education is an ongoing challenge. As a case in point, many of our customers were offering linear scales as an option on their equipment. While we feel linear scales are a superior solution, what we discovered is that the machine tool dealers did not fully recognize the benefits of the technology. So we recently did some extensive tests of machine tools to test the performance of rotary encoders versus linear encoders and we published the results.

Q: What technological innovations in motion control can we expect to see in the future?

A: I think in the short term for Heidenhain we're seeing a large increase in demand for absolute encoders--both linear and rotary. We're going to be introducing some new programmable encoders that will allow the storage of data on system parameters and application details. The benefit of this is that Heidenhain can build a rather sophisticated device using automated assembly techniques--a device that can be customized by the builder for a particular application. We're also going back to an age-old technology with new magnetic encoders, which perform particularly well in harsh environments.