In Knol-edge, Harrie Knol shares his knowledge on precision metal. Harrie is Head of Application Engineering at Veco and helps our clients' engineers to shape their projects.
In this video, Harrie talks about Laser Direct Imaging. Veco is the first one in the industry to use the LDI. What are the benefits and what do they mean to our customers?
Transcript below
Today I want to give you some benefits of laser direct imaging. At Veco nowadays, 90% to 95% of our photo resist is exposed by using a laser direct imaging. It enables us to have our distal data diary written into a photo resist. It has several advantages which I want to share with you.
For example, starting with the tooling cost. We nearly don't have any tooling costs. Of course, you have to rework your distal data, but we have no tooling costs like glass tooling, and you can imagine especially with glass tooling, sometimes we have to spend thousands of dollars before we can even start our production.
The equipment is very flexible. That means that you can easily change your design. If you have run a sample base, it’s quite easy to make some corrections and run the other one. It's also very fast. You will be aware that with glass tooling you need vacuumation time, and with LDI we don't need vacuumation time anymore, which might save you minutes per copy.
We're also able to make a very high aspect ratio. For example the second picture, it's a penal camera that's used for banknote identification. To give you some examples, we can make 25 or 30 micro lines in photo resin thickness from 75 up to 100 microns; very important, especially for electroforming, where we have to make very, very fine details.
We also have a higher yield by using this laser direct imaging. And you can imagine the glass tooling, milo tooling, it'll contaminate during all the exposure we have to run: 10, 20, 10 exposures, it will contaminate. Laser direct imaging doesn't have this problem.
The last product, I have it here with me, it's about a product that’s used for glass fiber communication. We have to put four, five sometimes even up to seven layers together and there's an alignment tool on our laser direct imaging that gives us a perfect fit.
Overall, for us, business wise the main benefit of using this LDI is definitely very short run times on our samples and that means that we can deliver samples normally within 5 or 10 days.
For example, starting with the tooling cost. We nearly don't have any tooling costs. Of course, you have to rework your distal data, but we have no tooling costs like glass tooling, and you can imagine especially with glass tooling, sometimes we have to spend thousands of dollars before we can even start our production.
The equipment is very flexible. That means that you can easily change your design. If you have run a sample base, it’s quite easy to make some corrections and run the other one. It's also very fast. You will be aware that with glass tooling you need vacuumation time, and with LDI we don't need vacuumation time anymore, which might save you minutes per copy.
We're also able to make a very high aspect ratio. For example the second picture, it's a penal camera that's used for banknote identification. To give you some examples, we can make 25 or 30 micro lines in photo resin thickness from 75 up to 100 microns; very important, especially for electroforming, where we have to make very, very fine details.
We also have a higher yield by using this laser direct imaging. And you can imagine the glass tooling, milo tooling, it'll contaminate during all the exposure we have to run: 10, 20, 10 exposures, it will contaminate. Laser direct imaging doesn't have this problem.
The last product, I have it here with me, it's about a product that’s used for glass fiber communication. We have to put four, five sometimes even up to seven layers together and there's an alignment tool on our laser direct imaging that gives us a perfect fit.
Overall, for us, business wise the main benefit of using this LDI is definitely very short run times on our samples and that means that we can deliver samples normally within 5 or 10 days.
Stay tuned and see more FAQs answered by Harrie Knol, the industry leading expert in Electroforming.
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