LPKF laser shoots 680,000 circular holes per hour

Citation

(2009), "LPKF laser shoots 680,000 circular holes per hour", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 21 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2009.21921cad.002

LPKF laser shoots 680,000 circular holes per hour

Article Type: New products From: Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Volume 21, Issue 3

“Punching” is the name of LPKF Laser & Electronics AG’s new method: a specially equipped IR laser cuts more than half a million holes in a stencil film – with excellent hole geometries.

The tiny holes with diameters of 30 μm are packed together extremely closely on the 30-μm-thick stainless steel stencil. At least 200,000 holes are needed to guarantee the required function: the stencil acts as a membrane between two fluidic zones in a customer application.

“To satisfy this challenging demand, we specially tuned one of our top systems. We are convinced that punching 680,000 holes an hour with a production system is an absolute world record”, says Florian Roick, a Product Manager at LPKF who attributes the high performance to three key factors: LPKF has years of experience developing high-quality laser systems, has established an enormous knowledge base about laser micro-material processing, and creates its own programs to raise the efficiency of the whole system to this high level.