Laser manufacturing technology is based on the physical interaction between the high energy of the laser and the material to vaporize, ablate, and modify the material to achieve the material processing effect. Nowadays, laser processing has quickly entered all walks of life. At present, it is still mainly processing metal materials, occupying 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 better effect on lasers, so laser processing is easy to apply. For some common metal laser cutting and welding applications, you may only need to know the corresponding optical power, but the research requirements for processing are actually not very strict.
But in fact, many non-metallic materials are used in daily 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, ablation degree, and material damage control are very strict, and it is often required to achieve ultra-fine processing, 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 that the output beam is in the ultraviolet spectrum and is invisible to the naked eye. At present, the common industrial ultraviolet lasers include solid crystal ultraviolet lasers and gas ultraviolet lasers. Three times the frequency of the infrared all-solid-state laser can get the ultraviolet laser output, and the wavelength is mostly 355nm. At present, the pulse width has successfully developed from nanosecond to picosecond level. Excimer lasers are common gas ultraviolet lasers, which are mainly used for ophthalmic surgery and chip lithography. In recent years, fiber lasers have gradually developed products in the ultraviolet band, and picosecond ultraviolet fiber lasers are the most representative.
Because ultraviolet lasers lose much 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 processing, which is very suitable for processing brittle materials.
Common brittle material processing by UV laser
Glass is a material widely used in daily life. From drinking glasses, wine glasses, containers to glass ornaments, pattern making on glass is often a difficult problem. Traditional processing often results in a high rate of glass damage. Ultraviolet lasers are very suitable for glass surfaces. It can be used for marking, patterning, and ultra-fine production. Ultraviolet laser marking makes up for various deficiencies in the past, such as low processing accuracy, difficult drawing, damage to the workpiece, and environmental pollution. With its unique processing advantages, it has become the new favorite of glass processing, and has been listed as a must-have by various wine glasses, craft gifts and other industries. Processing tools.
Ceramic materials are widely used in construction, utensils, decorations, etc., but in fact, ceramics also have many applications in electronic product devices. For example, mobile phone merchants have introduced ceramic back covers before, which are widely used in mobile communications, optical communications, and electronic products. Ceramic ferrules, ceramic substrates, ceramic package bases, ceramic cover plates for fingerprint identification systems, etc. are used. The more sophisticated the production of these ceramic components, the use of ultraviolet laser cutting is currently an ideal choice. Ultraviolet laser has very high processing precision for some ceramic thin slices, 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 to cut by the general cutter wheel, and the wear is large, the yield is low, and the cutting path 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 greatly increased, and higher requirements have been put forward for improving productivity and finished product yield. Ultraviolet laser cutting wafers can achieve high-precision cutting, smooth cuts, and greatly improved yields.
Quartz cutting has always been a problem in the industry. The most commonly used traditional processing method is the "embroid saw blade", which is processed by the "hard-to-hard" method. Quartz is very brittle and difficult to process. Diamond saw blades are consumables.
The ultraviolet laser has an ultra-high precision of ±0.02mm, which can fully guarantee the precise cutting requirements. When facing quartz cutting, precise control of the power can make the cut surface very smooth, and the speed is much faster than manual processing. The parameters can be displayed in full digital, and different parameters can be adjusted accurately through the computer. It is more intuitive than accurate, and the difficulty of getting started is much lower than that of manual cutting.