Increasing productivity by combining laser processes

Abstract Increasing the material ablation rate in micromachining of precise geometries by ultrashort‐pulsed laser treatment with high average power causes a decrease of achievable surface quality due to heat accumulation. To overcome this drawback, combined laser processes offer a significant increase of the overall productivity by the implementation of laser cleaning and polishing processes that require negligible additional processing time, but allow material removal to be performed with maximum process efficiency.