Coherent Glasgow Center Of Excellence Unifies Operations For Femtosecond And Picosecond Lasers

Coherent Coherent's Ultrafast Centre of Excellence in Glasgow, Scotland, has unified all of the company's ultrafast laser operations, including the manufacture of all pico- and femtosecond lasers, at Coherent's Ultrafast Centre of Excellence in Glasgow, Scotland, a global innovator in the fields of materials, networks and lasers.
Coherent Glasgow, a state-of-the-art volume manufacturing facility with a focus on lean manufacturing, recently expanded to meet the important work requirement of unifying operations. Coherent's flagship femtosecond lasers, such as the Coherent Monaco, and picosecond lasers, such as the Rapid and HyperRapid series, will now be manufactured in Glasgow.
Chris Dorman, executive vice president of the laser business unit, said the expansion of the Center of Excellence for the change will enable incredible cross-product synergy and standardization of components and processes, and will enable integrated resource planning. More importantly, it will bring many significant benefits to our customers, especially our volume OEMs, including:
One-stop-shop for all ultra-short pulse (USP) lasers
Accelerated product development
Reduced lead times
Improved batch processing capabilities
Increased operational flexibility
And several other tangible benefits
"This significant shift in the company's structure is evidence of the maturity of today's femtosecond laser technology, which is comparable to picosecond lasers in terms of stability and long-term reliability, ease of operation, and compact, rugged packaging. This maturity is reflected in the lasers themselves and in the way they are applied, including 24/7 high-volume industrial applications (e.g., cutting flexible displays), life sciences applications (e.g., cancer cell analysis), and "hard-core" laboratory science research areas (e.g., attosecond physics)."
Easy-to-Use, Ultra-Reliable Push-Button Femtosecond Lasers
In all of these areas, Dorman notes, femtosecond lasers have become easy-to-use, ultra-reliable, push-button tools, a far cry from the engineering innovations of just a few years ago." They are smaller and more powerful than ever before, and most types now offer advanced push-button performance in a rugged, sealed form."
These features allow femtosecond lasers to be deeply integrated into production tools and machines for the many applications geared toward the display and semiconductor industries that must be guaranteed 24/7 operation. These lasers are also widely used for precision cutting in medical device manufacturing, such as next-generation coronary stents.
Femtosecond lasers have also been upgraded in power, with Coherent's latest Monaco model offering up to 150 watts of infrared output or up to 50 watts of ultraviolet output. The latter is an important performance milestone for achieving volume cutting of flexible displays.
Fabian Soerensen, product line manager for industrial ultrashort pulsed lasers, explains that this evolution in application utility has coincided with changes in the way lasers are manufactured.
While ultrashort pulse lasers have some incredibly unique capabilities, a key aspect is that they are now maturing as complete material processing tools," he says. Customers ranging from large manufacturers to small job shops no longer need in-house laser engineers. The efficient approach has been well proven in the volume production of our picosecond industrial lasers and scientific femtosecond lasers such as the Chameleon. Now, all of our USP ultrafast lasers will benefit from the exact same lean manufacturing approach."
Soerensen adds that another driving factor behind this harmonization is the rapidly growing OEM demand for Monaco lasers in the display and semiconductor industries. He explains, "Popular in both industries, these lasers combine femtosecond pulse widths with tens of watts of UV power or up to 150 watts of near-infrared power in order to stay in sync with upstream and downstream processes in high-volume production applications and to meet high quality requirements."
"So far, we have had great success manufacturing these lasers in Santa Clara, California. There has never been a better time to move production to Scotland, where we have the complete technology and expertise to increase yields with extreme inter-device consistency. We can provide the flexibility our OEM customers need while improving the reliability and overall performance of our products, transforming a scientific curiosity into a cornerstone of today's industry."