Femtosecond laser micromachining of ceramics

In this work, we present the application of ultrashort and intense laser pulses (110 fs @ 1 kHz; up to 1.1 mJ/pulse) to the micromachining of ceramics, specifically Rubalit(TM)708S, a material based on alumina and widely used as a substrate in microelectronics. The mechanism for removing material is the so called direct ablation. It differs from thermal ablation of conventional lasers in the practically total absence of thermal effects which produces a remarkable increase of quality and precision of the machining. By means of an optical diffraction-based technique we find out the energy density threshold to work in the direct ablation regime. Adjusting the energy per pulse as well as the number of pulses, we are able to drill holes of the desired diameter and depth. In addition, processing is developed in air. We also demonstrate that high quality fs-laser micromachining is suitable for every ceramic, whatever the mechanical properties, with similar working parameters. In order to show this point, we have also processed sintered SiN, a material of wide-ranging interest in industry.