Contract Manufacturing

Many of the folks at LightMachinery have over 30 years of experience in industrial laser processing, designing laser processes, developing standards for processing and inspecting components.  Obviously we have deep expertise in excimer and TEA CO2 lasers but our range of experience and in-house capability also includes YAG and CW CO2 lasers.  Excimer and CO2 lasers are ideal for the drilling, marking, micromachining, stripping, vaporizing and removal of of polymers and other dielectric materials.  The short pulse lengths and very high peak powers of these lasers creates very precise cuts and ablations with low debris and very small heat affected zones. 

If you are wondering about the feasibility of your requirement then just  contact us and tell us about your challenge, we are happy to provide feedback and suggestions or if it makes sense to use our technology then you can send us a sample for some processing tests.

35 micron x 14mm slit cut with the excimer laser in our lab

35um wide slit - zoomed on to display the edge quality

Bifilar solid core wires, 0.014" wire diameter, 0.003" thickness insulation, stripped with an IMPACT TEA CO2 laser

The high absorption of the 9.3 µm wavelength in most polymer materials, combined with the short pulse duration of TEA CO2 lasers, means that Impact lasers mimic the photo-ablative excimer process of excimer lasers, at ~50% of the capital cost, <10% of the operating cost, and generally higher throughput.

Ceramic chip capacitor marking, very small character sizes, high throughput, good contrast on most ceramics. Excimer marking is normally integrated into an automated test handler.

An excellent example of the quality and precision achieved by the excimer laser drilling plastic. This is 75 micron thick polyimide with 50 micron diameter holes.

Excimer laser wire stripping a single 50um wire with polyimide insulation

Excimer laser wire stripping of multiple wires, 50um wire diameter, Polyimide insulation

Heavier Gage wire stripping. 14 gage wire, 2mm in diameter, insulation 12 microns thick. Wire has been stripped only from one side a common requirement that is easily accomplished with the excimer laser.

SEM picture of a beautiful round 50 micron hole drilled in a printed circuit board. These via holes are drilled through a top copper layer, through the board insulation down to the copper layer below. Once the hole is plated it creates an electrical connection between tracks on different board layers.

A variety of brake line tubes stripped with the TEA CO2 laser - photo courtesy of 4Jet

Here is the same hole drilled through the top copper layer and the fiberboard down to the next copper layer shown at 500X

50um holes drilled in a copper clad printed circuit board