MICROMACHINING


Systèmes’ technique. ‘In the next two quarters some mobile phone manufacturers could potentially implement these techniques in their production.’ Yield is important, but so is the speed of cutting,


Rouffiange noted. Amplitude Systèmes can achieve 3m/s cutting speed with its femtosecond laser.


Work to be done While ultrafast lasers are beginning to be adopted in consumer electronics production, it’s still early days for the technology. ‘Tere’s a lot of process development that has to happen to adopt laser technology,’ commented Chui. ‘It’s one thing to demonstrate that you can do the process and another to implement it in high volume manufacturing. Tere’s a lot of work on that front. ‘On the laser front, it’s getting the throughput up


and the costs down,’ he continued. ‘For most of these applications, that’s the key thing. It’s already economical in terms of cost per throughput for some processes, and in other cases there needs to be more progress made.’ Deile from Coherent noted that ultrashort pulsed


lasers are not the bottleneck in terms of throughput. ‘Te bottleneck is really on the machine side; we cannot move axes, cannot manipulate the workpiece fast enough to take advantage of what


Amplitude Systèmes’ Yuja laser is lightweight and can be placed on a gantry together with the Glass module for cutting glass


lasers can do, in most cases,’ he said. Femtosecond infrared lasers can now reach


100W, which is relatively high power – MKS Instruments demonstrated its Spectra-Physics Spirit 1030-100 at Laser World of Photonics in Munich in June, which can deliver femtosecond pulses at 100W of infrared power. ‘Tere’s research working at much higher powers, but the problem with going to powers higher than 100W is that, with the shorter pulses, you need to go to a higher repetition rate to produce the result,’ explained Chui. ‘You can’t put too much energy into a very short pulse at a slow repetition rate without causing damage, which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. ‘Te challenge is that the motion systems


to handle the fast repetition rates have reached their limits, galvo scanners in particular,’ he added. ‘People are looking at other options, such as polygon scanners, to get faster scanning speeds.’ Tere are other machining steps in


manufacturing consumer electronics where ultrashort pulse lasers can play a role, such as cutting or drilling small holes or features. Tese features typically need straight side walls, according to Deile, so a process called bottom-up ablation is used, whereby the angle of the cut edge can be controlled to create tapers. Top-down ablation using ultrashort pulsed


lasers is also possible and used for instance to produce a chamfer, to remove any sharp edges, so that the screen is less susceptible to fracturing upon impact. ‘Tis is a process that the industry is also looking to adopt to replace mechanical polishing and grinding,’ Deile remarked. ‘If you look at how mature these processes are


and the state of adoption into production, then filamentation is a mature process and is being adopted right now,’ Deile added. ‘Bottom-up ablation is also being adopted at the moment, while top-down ablation for chamfering is still currently under development.’


Micromachining Shouldn’t be a Giant Task Linear Stages


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