SUMMARY:

Colin Moorhouse, Coherent Inc., discusses ultrafast (picosecond) industrial lasers for high-precision manufacturing of smartphone displays and other leading-edge devices. These tools can help reduce the size, weight, and material cost of devices; the lasers’ unique operating regime (megawatts of peak power) enables clean cutting and patterning of sensitive materials and thin films used in a number of novel devices as well as micromachining of wide bandgap, "difficult" materials such as glass. In several instances, the picosecond laser is replacing multi-step photolithography with a single-step direct-write laser process; in other cases it supplants traditional cutting/drilling processes. With a choice of near-IR, green, or ultraviolet output, these lasers can micromachine almost any material bringing new technologies to market successfully.

FIGURE. Schematic of a basic OLED structure.

The article covers patterning organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), thin-film solar cells, and bioabsorbable stents as well as laser drilling of transparent materials. Read it at our sister publication, Industrial Laser Solutions, here: http://www.industrial-lasers.com/articles/2012/05/picosecond-laser-enables-new-high-tech-devices.html