UV lasers source are very common for processing glass, ceramics, wafers, quartz

Laser manufacturing technology is based on the physical interaction between the high energy of the laser and the material, and the material is vaporized, ablated, modified, etc. to achieve the material processing effect. Nowadays, laser processing has rapidly entered all walks of life, and it is still dominated by metal material processing, accounting for more than 80% of the entire laser processing application. Since metals such as iron, copper, aluminum and corresponding alloys are hard materials, they have a good effect on the laser, so they are easy to apply to laser processing. For some common metal laser cutting and welding applications, you may only need to know the corresponding optical power, and the research requirements for processing are not very strict.

But in fact, many non-metallic materials are used in life and high-end manufacturing, such as soft materials, thermoplastic materials, heat-sensitive materials, ceramic materials, semiconductor materials, and brittle materials such as glass. If these materials are to be processed by laser, the requirements for beam properties, degree of ablation, and control of material damage are very strict, and ultra-fine processing is often required, even at the micro-nano level. It is often difficult to achieve results with common infrared lasers, and ultraviolet lasers are a very suitable choice.

Ultraviolet laser technology is versatile

Ultraviolet laser refers to the light whose output beam is in the ultraviolet spectrum and invisible to the naked eye. At present, the common industrial ultraviolet lasers include solid crystal ultraviolet lasers and gas ultraviolet lasers. The ultraviolet laser output can be obtained by frequency doubling the infrared all-solid-state laser, and the wavelength is mostly 355nm. At present, the pulse width has been successfully developed from nanoseconds to picoseconds. The most common gas UV lasers are excimer lasers, which can be mainly used in ophthalmic surgery, chip lithography, etc. In recent years, fiber lasers have gradually developed products in the ultraviolet band, and picosecond ultraviolet fiber lasers are the most representative.

Since ultraviolet lasers lose a lot of heat during frequency doubling conversion, and the cost is still high, it is still difficult to achieve higher power at present. Ultraviolet laser is often regarded as a cold light source, so ultraviolet laser processing is also called cold working, which is very suitable for the processing of brittle materials.

Common Brittle Materials Processing with UV Lasers

Glass is a material that is widely used in life. From water glasses, wine glasses, containers to glass accessories, pattern making on glass is often a difficult problem. Traditional processing often results in high glass damage rates. Ultraviolet lasers are very suitable for glass surfaces. Marking, pattern making, and can achieve ultra-fine production. Ultraviolet laser marking makes up for various shortcomings such as low processing accuracy, difficulty in drawing, damage to workpieces, and environmental pollution. With its unique processing advantages, it has become the new favorite of glass product processing, and is listed as a must-have in various wine glasses, craft gifts and other industries. machining tools.

Ceramic materials are widely used in construction, utensils, decorations, etc., but in fact ceramics also have many applications in electronic products. For example, some mobile phone merchants have launched ceramic back covers, which are widely used in mobile communication, optical communication, and electronic products. Ceramic ferrules, ceramic substrates, ceramic packaging bases, ceramic cover plates for fingerprint identification systems, etc. used. The production of these ceramic components is becoming more and more refined, and UV laser cutting is an ideal choice at present. Ultraviolet laser has very high processing precision for some ceramic sheets, will not cause ceramic fragmentation, and does not require secondary grinding for one-time forming, and will be more used in the future.

Ultraviolet laser wafer cutting: The surface of the sapphire substrate is hard, and it is difficult for the cutter wheel to cut it, and the wear is large, the yield is low, and the cutting line is larger than 30 μm, which not only reduces the use area, but also reduces the output of the product. Driven by the blue-and-white LED industry, the demand for sapphire substrate wafer cutting has increased significantly, which has put forward higher requirements for improving productivity and finished product pass rate. Ultraviolet laser cutting wafers can achieve high-precision cutting, smooth incisions, and greatly improve the yield.

Quartz cutting has always been a difficult problem in the industry. In the traditional processing method, the most commonly used is the "emery stone saw blade", that is, it is processed by the "head-to-head" method. Quartz is very brittle and difficult to process, and the diamond saw blade is the consumable.

Ultraviolet laser has an ultra-high precision of ±0.02mm, which can fully guarantee precise cutting requirements. In the face of quartz cutting, precise control of power can make the cut surface very smooth, and the speed is much faster than manual processing. All parameters can be displayed in full digital, and different parameters can be precisely adjusted by computer, which is more intuitive than accurate, and the difficulty of getting started is much lower than that of manual cutting.