In the following pages you find a tutorial on our Technology and an insight of the main features that distinguish our product lines and give us, and to our customers, a competitive advantage in the current highly competitive global scenario.In particular, we review the basics of Fiber Lasers and High Power UV Lasers Furthermore, we highlight the most relevant Features of our laser systems, and namely the outstanding Laser Beam Characteristics (Spot Size Dimensions) and the reduced Cost of Ownership (Fiber Lasers). Finally, the main characteristics of our user friendly Software are listed.
Fiber lasers differ greatly from both Lamp Pumped and Diode Pumped lasers.
Fiber lasers use a telecommunications grade diode to pump an optical fiber. Extremely compact and efficient, fiber lasers have superior beam quality and stability over Lamp Pumped and Diode Pumped system. This virtually maintenance-free laser is available only in IR (1060 – 1070 nm) wavelength at this time.
The fiber lasers are rated for well in excess 30,000 hours of operation.
Fiber sources provide high electrical to optical efficiency (more than 30% for Yb-doped fiber amplifiers) with a wall plug consumption of few hundreds Watts, can achieve diffraction limited beam quality (M2 = 1), very easy power dissipation due to high surface-area to volume ratio.
Fiber Lasers do not require consumables other than electrical power.
Compare the technology of fiber lasers:
The fiber laser are built with “all fiber” technology, which is immune of misalignment and does not request any adjustment during operation. All fiber means that all the relevant components are fiber spliced (pump diodes, fiber combiners, active fiber etc).
On the contrary, conventional Diode or Flash pumped YAG lasers are built on “discrete optical components” technology or, essentially, single components set on a breadboard and adjusted during fabrication and during operation:
It is evident from construction principles that fiber lasers lead to very high stability over time, absence or limited need of service (with related costs).
Top ^Multi-watt, diode-pumped Q-switched 355nm lasers are the ideal tools for high-precision micromachining applications in the microelectronics industry. This is primarily due to the excellent UV absorption characteristics of most commonly used materials and the small minimum spot diameter d, which is a function of the beam quality factor M2, the wavelength l, and the numerical aperture of the focusing lens:
| d» | M2 x l |
| NA |
Furthermore, the high peak power and pulse energies obtained by Q-switching the laser enable efficient material removal rates and the high 355-nm photon energy enables a material interaction with a reduced heat-affected zone.
Based on these characteristics, multi-watt diode-pumped Q-switched 355-nm lasers have made inroads into themicroelectronics industry.
In addition, due to the increasing integration of microelectronics devices and the associated smaller features, in many areas these lasers have become an enabling technology with few viable alternatives.
At the same time, the emergence of these high-volume laser applications has triggered laser manufacturers to invest increasingly in this technology, leading to more and more mature high-power diode-pumped Q-switched 355-nm laser products.
Today, these lasers have won the trust of many leading system integrators and end users within themicroelectronics industry, and are commercially available with high performance and a reliability that is measured in many thousands of hours.
Top ^The spotsize is the direct evidence of the quality of a laser device, and allows the exploitation of all the available emitted laser power.
The laser beam can be tightly focused, the energy is completely used in the marking or micromachining process, avoiding unwanted side thermal effects (other than those intrinsic to the laser wavelength nature).
The proof of this statement lies in the experimental evidence that Fiber Laser has a marking efficiency roughly 4 (four) times higher than a Lamp Pumped YAG and about 2 (two) times higher than a Diode Pumped YAG.
In other words, e.g. 10 W fiber laser can be compared to 40 W LP and 20 W DP as marking efficiency. On the other hand, the micromachining efficiency is more difficult to quantify, since a lower quality laser (like DP or LP can be) will simply not allow processes that are feasible with fiber laser.
We have characterized the spotsize on various materials of interest, the results are summarized in the following table:
| Materials | Spot size (microns) |
| Stainless Steel | 8 |
| Aluminium | 9 |
| Brass | 9 |
| Cr-coated Steel | 9 |
| Molibdenum | 9 |
| Titanium | 9 |
| Tungsten | 9 |
| Silicon | < 4 |
| CrO on Glass | < 10 |
| Al on Glass | < 10 |
Tungsten |
Silicon |
The following table reports and compares the cost items to be taken into account when comparing different technologies for similar application. A correct comparison should then include not only the original equipment investment cost (purchasing price), but (often more relevant) also the cost of ownership as listed below. The synthesis of the data reported in the following table is that no consumables other than electrical power are required to run fiber lasers.
Finally, it should be noted that the estimation below is conservative, since it does not include the system downtime that might be significant in case of Lamp Pumped laser systems.
| YAG Lamp Pumped |
YAG Diode pumped |
Blitz 20P | |
| Consumables: Lamps |
€ 13.900,00 | ||
| Consumables: Diodes |
€ 26.000,00 | ||
| Electrical Power (0.15 Euro/kW-h) Laser Head: |
€ 21.400,00 | € 3.500,00 | € 700,00 |
| Electrical Power (0.15 Euro/kW-h) Chiller: |
€ 21.400,00 | ||
| Cost of Ownership: | € 56.700,00 | € 29.500,00 | € 700,00 |
Blitz laser marking software allows you to define marking jobs using a variety of editing tools:
Runs under Windows 98/ME/NT/2000/XP, unit switch (mm / inch / bits)
Job editor| Design | Realization | |
| Diamond drilling: Sequence of laser etching done layer by layer, tuning dimensions an laser power |
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| Digital hologram: Import of a bitmap generated by a coding algorithm and transfer to silicon wafer |
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