Metal foil is a thin metal sheet made of metal extension, each type of ultra-thin metal foil has different and important applications in various industries. For example, steel and alloy foils are mainly used in electronics and aerospace, titanium alloy foils can be used to make decorative grids on jet engine combustion tubes, tungsten and molybdenum foils are used for electronic tubes and heat generating elements, iron-nickel soft-magnetic alloy foils are used to make the cores of miniature high-frequency pulse transformers, magnetic recorders, etc., as well as copper foils that will be mentioned in the following section, which can be used to make copper-clad laminates.
Copper-clad laminate (CCL) is an electronic fiberglass cloth or other reinforcing materials impregnated with resin, one side or both sides covered with copper foil and hot-pressed into a plate material, referred to as copper-clad board, a variety of different forms and functions of the printed circuit board are etched, drilled holes and other processes on the copper-clad board made of various types of printed circuits.
Copper foil in the printed circuit board plays the role of interconnection conduction, support, etc., the performance of the printed circuit board has a direct relationship with the quality of the board, its importance is self-evident, and the cost and difficulty of manufacturing copper foil is high, so the high precision required in the cutting of copper foil, in order to increase the utilization rate of the copper foil for manufacturers to reduce the cost of production.
Compared with laser cutting, the traditional knife die cutting process is slightly inferior in terms of efficiency, processing speed, cutting loss and cutting accuracy. Currently, UV lasers are commonly used in the industry for copper foil cutting. The industrial-grade nanosecond solid-state laser developed by Nuffy Optoelectronics brings 355nm UV laser with high beam quality and high power, which is especially suitable for cutting copper foil after integrating optics, moving parts and vision control software.
It has high beam quality (M2 <1.2), the focusing focal point obtained after joining the supporting optical equipment is very small, the spot diameter is micrometer, the power density is very high, and the parameters such as the position, size, and focal depth of the focal point can be set to perform high-quality cutting with a small cutting gap and high precision. Moreover, UV laser wavelength is short, material applicability is wide, absorption rate is high, the cutting process is "cold processing", with very small pulse width (<25ns), bringing non-thermal damage to the material, there is no heating or thermal deformation on the inner layer of the processed surface and the nearby areas, the heat-affected zone is small, and there is no carbonization and burring on the edge of the cut copper foil, the effect is very good, the cutting gap is small, and the precision is high. , burr, the effect is very good, can ultraviolet processing basically become synonymous with precision cold processing. At the same time the efficiency of laser processing is also very high, can be good and fast for manufacturers to bring real benefits.
With the rapid development of the communications industry, copper-clad laminates have brought an unprecedentedly large market, and the demand for copper foil applications as the basic material for copper-clad laminates will continue to rise. Nuffield's industrial-grade nanosecond solid-state lasers can realize high-precision and high-density cutting as well as microvia processing, which is an ideal processing tool for copper foil cutting as it caters to the current pace of development of copper-clad laminates.
