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JUNE 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 17 equipment manufacturers built hybrid laser drill machines which were especially advanta- geous for small- and medium-sized companies where batch sizes were smaller or it was too expensive, for environmental reasons, to etch down all your copper. Hybrid drilling served a niche market. You could drill copper thick- nesses from 6–9 microns up to 35 microns for the top copper. By using the different drilling methods, you could vary the via size from three mils (0.003") up to about 10 mils (0.010"). That was this technology's sweet spot, and it became established in the industry as the tool of choice for a lot of companies that ran smaller batches and had to be very agile. Hybrid tools seem to be the best of all worlds. It was flexible because some applications also demanded a cleaning process. After the CO 2 laser, there's a risk of a very thin layer of left- over material in the hole. We could then also use the UV laser in a third step to clean the target pad to improve ongoing steps for the plating process, enabling a better connec- tion and better bonding. You only needed one laser machine, one small box measur- ing about 2x2 meters, and you could fur- ther enhance quality and reliability because you didn't have to manually move the panels from one machine to another and back again. With the UV nanosecond laser, the individ- ual pulse is 10 to the power of minus nine sec- onds long, which is really short. With ongo- ing improvements in laser technology, ultra- short pulse lasers have emerged. is means the pulse duration was reduced from nano- seconds to picoseconds, and today, even femtoseconds are the industrial standard. Femtoseconds are difficult to conceptualize. Yes, but it's a really broad range. e ben- efit of shorter pulses is easy to explain. Try it at home: If you touch a hot stove in your kitchen, you will feel the pulse durations. e longer you touch it, the more it burns your fingers, and you can see the mark. e shorter the impact time, the less heat trans- fer is visible on your fingers or hand. e main reason for using picosecond lasers: to reduce the heat-affected load on the panel. It is important for heat-sensitive materials and for high-density, very fine layouts where you have heat effects from one hole to another. But the benefits I mentioned from the pico- second lasers? at's also in the past. Two years ago, we created a more cost-effective h ybrid drilling machine with the picosecond technol- ogy. Our customers typically have either tradi- tional UV nanosecond hybrid drilling or pure picosecond laser systems for cutting applica- tions and other microvia drilling applications where the CO 2 laser is not required.