Dash line glass- and sapphire-cutting with high power USP laser

Glass cutting is a subject of high interest for flat panel display and consumer electronics industries. Among laser-based, water jet-based and diamond tool-based existing solutions, ultra-short pulses (USP) appear as a promising technology since this laser technology has the unique capacity to produce highly localized bulk modification owing to non-linear absorption. The cutting using USP lasers could be performed either by full ablation which is slow and generates a lot of dust, by controlled fracture propagation which is slow as well and may lead to path deviation, by stealth dicing which produces rough sidewalls, or by self-breaking induced by in-volume laser irradiation. The laser treatment is often continuous which is not necessary to perform glass cutting and may lead to over-exposure. In this paper we report on single pass glass and sapphire cutting using an USP laser (20W @200kHz or 8W@2MHz) using dash line laser treatment along the cutting trajectory. In-volume energy deposition was done along the glass thickness owing to a Bessel beam. The results will be discussed in terms of sidewall profile and roughness, path deviation, rim sharpness, energy dose and feed rate. Dash line treatment enables to tune the energy deposition and to produce the cutting effect but with a narrower heat affected zone, a better sidewall quality and a more accurate trajectory control of the cutting path.