Excimer lasers in manufacturing

Heinrich Endert; Rainer Paetzel; Uwe Stamm; Dirk Basting

doi:10.1117/12.270013

27 March 1997 Excimer lasers in manufacturing

Heinrich Endert, Rainer Paetzel, Uwe Stamm, Dirk Basting

Proceedings Volume 2993, Lasers as Tools for Manufacturing II; (1997) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.270013
Event: Photonics West '97, 1997, San Jose, CA, United States

Abstract

The year 1997 will become known as the 'year of commercial excimer lasers.' The number of installations on manufacturing and medical floors will be much higher than ever before. Besides the medical uses the most important applications are DUV lithography, TFT annealing for flat panel displays and microdrilling for nozzle arrays, especially for ink jet printer heads. Recently two very important breakthroughs were achieved. The first is in regard to the performance of the excimer laser itself. The second is a much more efficient way of using the UV photons. These are the main reasons for the actual success. Technology development by laser manufacturers has resulted in remarkable improvements of component lifetime, reliability, cost of ownership and ease of use. With gas and optics lifetimes in excess of 10⁸ pulses, laser tube exchange intervals longer than 5 multiplied by 10⁹ pulses and integration of internal halogen generators a quasi sealed-off excimer laser with hands-free operation is accomplished. The new generation NovaLine^TM combines the experience of more than 4000 installed excimer lasers with a completely new laser engineering design. Progress in advanced UV optics will be demonstrated with two examples. In commercial production of very precise nozzle arrays, high-end optics allow the drilling of all nozzles simultaneously with an optical distortion of less than 0.5 micrometer over a full 0 18 mm processing field. For scanning applications as AMLCD annealing, the rectangular laser beam can be optically transformed into a very homogeneous line, up to 300 mm long and 0.5 mm wide.

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Heinrich Endert, Rainer Paetzel, Uwe Stamm, and Dirk Basting "Excimer lasers in manufacturing", Proc. SPIE 2993, Lasers as Tools for Manufacturing II, (27 March 1997); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.270013

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KEYWORDS

Excimer lasers

Optics manufacturing

Laser applications

Manufacturing

UV optics

Laser development

Ultraviolet radiation

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