Laser Applications in Micro-Machining of Glass Material Substrates

Glass materials has been widely used in modern electronics due to their tough mechanical strength and superior electronic properties. They can be found in printed circuit boards in the form of fiber glass. Nowadays, they can also serve as substrates of integrated circuit wafer. However, due to the brittle property they are not easy to machine precisely without any burrs or chips. Due to the different purpose and work piece properties careful selection of laser is necessary. In is study, we used different lasers for micromachining of two different glass related applications, namely, fiberglass PCB (12ps pulsed laser @355nm) and glass substrate (CO<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf> laser) for optical waveguide in packaging. The main criteria of PCB is the minimal burr while the requirement for the wave guide is the surface smoothness. The tuning process of parameters is described and the results are presented.