Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1536435
JUNE 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 19 What applications are you mainly targeting for this new hybrid drilling system? For this 3-mil (0.003") to 10-mil (0.010"), it's an all-in-one system, with lower main- tenance costs, and now more applications. We have this in small single-table systems, as well as the big setup—two tables with com- plete automation and panel flip. You can run complete shis with a total stack height of up to 400 millimeters, and you can do complete autonomous processing of this hybrid laser microvia drilling. Of course, the automation piece is key. But what can you tell me about your advanced beam? Beam shaping is required because, at a cer- tain point, we cannot use the hybrid drill- ing anymore. With hybrid drilling, you typi- cally focus your green picosecond laser beam to a tiny spot of roughly 20 microns, then inscribe a spiral to define the diameter and shape of the via. If you want a 4-mil via, you use your small pen and make circles getting bigger until you reach 4 mils (0.004"). Below 3-mil applications, there are other potentia l ways to drill a microvia without the demand of moving to beam to create a microvia of the desired size. One way is percussion drilling, which means your laser deflection system jumps to a posi- tion, and you apply a certain number of pulses to ablate the material. It's like stamping, where we use our laser beam profile as a stamp to imprint the laser beam profile into the PCB and the plated material. e drawback here is that, like a stamp, we use the geometry and the shape of the laser beam profile, always without any change in the position. us, any imperfection of the laser beam is repeatedly imprinted and superimposed. is will result in getting some level of aberrations. Also, we have—and this is valid for almost all laser types—a Gaussian beam profile, meaning that the center of the beam is at the highest intensity, with a slope creating a cer- tain taper when we do percussion drilling. We have variable beam expanders to adapt the size of the Gaussian beam profile, how- ever the general shape is still a Gaussian beam profile.