What Are The Noteworthy Laser Marking Trends And Innovations For 2023?

Since the mid-1960s, lasers have been used for mark making, etching and cutting. The world's first laser marking machine was developed in 1965, when it was the future of drilling holes in diamond manufacturing molds, and the technology subsequently gained rapid development.
The early introduction of CO2 lasers for marking occurred in 1967, and the technology reached maturity in the mid-1970s through the commercialization of modern CO2 laser systems. And since then, laser marking systems have become a mainstay in a wide range of industries with applications ranging from aerospace to medical device manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and retail.
What are some notable laser marking trends and innovations for 2023?
Panasonic introduces an operational demonstration of its 3D short-pulse fiber precision laser marking machine (image credit: Panasonic)
Despite competing with other technologies such as inkjet printing, lasers have been stamped as a powerful, low-cost and repeatable marking manufacturing technology. Importantly, the process is eco-friendly and requires no consumables (such as ink, cartridges and paper).
Nowadays, laser marking systems no longer rely solely on CO2 lasers; others, such as fiber lasers and Nd:YAG solid-state light sources, offer smaller footprints, lower maintenance costs and efficient alternatives. Advances in technological capabilities are also evident. The fastest commercial laser marking machines can now process tens of thousands of parts per hour.
While the evolution of laser marking technology has been rapid, manufacturers and users of laser marking systems are now looking for new routes to advance marking technology to meet new challenges and improve processing results.
Trend 1: Laser Marking of Ceramic Circuits
These challenges come from new materials to be processed, and new applications to be served - each driving the need for growth and innovation while shaping the market for laser system development.
Ceramics, for example, is one of the fastest-growing materials in laser processing, and this material is particularly important in semiconductor parts and circuit board manufacturing. Often referred to as the "mother of all electronic system products," printed circuit boards (PCBs) are a component used in virtually all electronic products, and small changes in PCB development have a significant impact on market trends.
In recent years, the focus has shifted to the use of ceramics in conventional printed circuit boards (PCBs), which are made from plastic epoxy resins such as FP4. Ceramic circuit boards offer excellent heat treatability, are easy to implement, and provide superior performance compared to non-ceramic PCBs. However, many marking techniques-such as screen processing-are not suitable for ceramics. Ink marking of ceramics is cumbersome, requires several consumables, and is not resistant to abrasion. The brittleness and hardness of ceramics also make them one of the more difficult materials to mark.
As a result, lasers have risen to prominence in recent years as an alternative to ink-printing technology, and many laser companies have developed systems particularly suited to ceramic marking, such as diode-pumped solid-state UV lasers, as well as conventional CO2 lasers.
"This definitely includes a trend towards miniaturization," says Andrew May, director of laser marking company ES Precision. However, he emphasizes that introducing new market trends does take time as well, "Is there a new application every week? No. But 15 years ago we never marked on miniature ceramics, and now we do."
Trend 2: More flexible materials, shapes and sizes
However, despite the rapid growth, ceramic markers for electronics are not currently ES Precision's biggest market. "The biggest industry for us is medical devices," says Andrew May, "then automotive, electronics and general engineering components. The range of products required varies greatly depending on the industry and the industry in question."
The company has eight laser systems (five of which are Galv-driven) providing marking services for a wide variety of applications. Because of this, and because the company is always getting new customers with customized needs - May stresses that for ES Precision, the ability to be flexible is crucial.
As a result, it uses lasers suitable for marking different materials, shapes and sizes, as well as different batch sizes. The range of markers it can offer is also as diverse as its customer base, with lasers capable of producing everything from codes to graphics and data matrices - all at high speed and with high reproducibility.
Catering to this flexibility is therefore a must for laser marker manufacturers such as Bluhm Systeme, says Antoinette Aufdermauer, editor of the company, which is constantly monitoring the market and developing its products accordingly.
Its marking systems include gas, fiber and solid-state lasers, including CO2 and YAG systems. The laser markers are pulsed and operate in the wavelength range of 0.355 μm to 10.6 μm. Each laser has its own characteristics and some similarities: CO2 lasers can be used to mark plastics, rubber, paper, and foils; fiber lasers are advantageous for marking steel and some plastics; and YAG lasers are suitable for marking metals and ceramics. We test all of our customers' materials extensively in advance in our laser lab," says Aufdermauer.
Portability is also important to ensure flexibility in laser marking operations, which is ideal for industrial customers, says Aufdermauer. For this reason, Bluhm Systeme's latest product, the "Lightworx," features a 20W fiber laser in a compact workstation that can be easily moved into production environments. The system produces "permanent, sharp and tamper-proof" markings on metals and plastics.
Trend 3: Growing demand for component traceability
Another important trend in the field of laser marking is the assurance and refinement of traceability - the individual identification of a product by means of a unique identification mark on its surface. This marking can take many forms, but increasingly popular and important is the use of data matrices such as two-dimensional codes (QR codes).
By marking an individual product with its own unique data matrix code, it can be easily identified in a non-intrusive way with key details such as manufacturer, batch number and lifetime. This provides quality assurance: consumers and users can determine the exact origin of a product. This quality assurance creates a direct link between the consumer and the manufacturer and gives added value to the product, enabling them to compete with lower-cost manufacturing.
Due to its incredible precision, the laser is ideally suited for writing detailed codes as small as 200 μm in size - too small to be seen by someone passing by, but easily checked with a smartphone if a person knows their location. At such sizes, data matrices can be used for anti-counterfeiting purposes, making it easy to check the authenticity of high-quality goods in a non-intrusive way. This has a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry as it is a way to ensure that medicines such as pills are not produced and distributed fraudulently.
Component traceability also plays an important role when used as evidence in litigation. For example, if someone has a medical transplant and the transplant fails, traceability allows them to know exactly what went wrong, where it went wrong, and in which batch it went wrong. This certainly increases efficiency in things like product recalls, but it also gives the customer more autonomy. It may not be obvious, but as society becomes more interested in litigation, the technology that can enhance litigation verdicts will have to keep up.
Traceability also contributes to another trend across manufacturing: improving environmental sustainability and reducing ecological impact. By tracking a product to know when it fails, or knowing when it reaches the end of its life cycle, manufacturers are better able to proactively replace and recycle. This also means that products can be returned for refurbishment as intended, so less equipment may end up in landfills.
However, current data matrix labeling systems face many challenges. Certain materials make handling more difficult - particularly glass and polymers, as well as thin metals and foils. The marking must also be permanent and stable, and the system must be able to accommodate a wide range of product sizes.
A particular challenge for some laser markers is marking on non-planar surfaces. Inkjet printers still outnumber laser-based systems in this area. As a result, system engineers are working to overcome these challenges. For example, Laserax, a manufacturer of laser marking systems, offers CO2 and fiber lasers with an average power of 20-500 W and varying cycle times, equipped with auto-adjusting focusing optics for use on 3D surfaces, which can be adjusted to the curvature of the object. To account for surfaces with unknown geometries, Laserax's systems use an autofocus vision system that first scans the 3D surface and then adjusts the laser focus during the marking process.
However, non-flat surfaces are not the only challenge facing manufacturers of laser marking systems. Dr. Florent Thibaut, CEO of QiOVA, a manufacturer of laser marking solutions, explains, "In many cases, marking solutions that are standardized globally, such as inkjet, are not able to meet the requirements needed to provide specific markings for each product. Currently, the usual use of lasers is already available as a continuous method, just like using a pen. However this is not fast enough - we need to find a solution that balances production volume and accuracy."
Sequential marking is affected by the fact that laser marking has to change for each product, so having a marking technology that can be adapted for each product is crucial. Manufacturers require extremely high throughput - the marking must adapt and the marking rate must be high - and this doesn't even take into account the difficulties of processing certain materials such as glass or polymers.
To solve this problem, QiOVA patented its VULQ1 technology, which won the Laser Systems Innovation Award at this year's Laser World Photonics Industrial Production Engineering, which does not opt for a method that uses a single, continuous beam of light (as traditional marking systems do). Instead, it uses hundreds of light beams to produce a stamp-like effect - generating an entire data matrix code in an instant. The method used to produce this unique stamp is dynamic beam shaping, which is accomplished using components such as a spatial light modulator (SLM).The SLM is able to adjust on a per-shot basis to create beams with a unique structure.
While other laser marking technologies may prioritize high repetition rates for high throughput, QiOVA uses higher pulse energies and parallel processing for better results.
Thibaut says, "This stamp-like marking solution unlocks tremendous productivity potential for 2D barcode marking and is simple to implement."
For example, its technology can be used to mark PVC medical parts with a 570-μm-wide data matrix code at a rate of 77,000 per hour. Other materials the system can mark include aluminum coated with HDPE polymer; soda-lime glass; borosilicate glass, pure gold and epoxy molded composite.
Thibault adds, "Pattern sizes can be as small as 100 μm while maintaining perfectly clear readability, even when marking in a straight line, as all dots are marked simultaneously." What's more, because it doesn't have to rely on high repetition frequencies, QiOVA can build systems using off-the-shelf infrared and green Nd:YAG lasers with repetition frequencies of around 20-30Hz, ensuring that its systems remain as cost-effective as possible.
Trend #4: Ultrafast lasers turn glass into data storage
Another exciting new area of laser marking: data storage. Researchers claim they can produce efficient data storage systems by using ultrafast lasers to encode data into glass/crystalline media. Data is stored in glass/crystal in the form of microablation, and once produced, will be able to be preserved for an amazing amount of time, the
In 2013, Hitachi announced its first quartz crystal data storage system, and in 2014, researchers at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Center (ORC) announced their development of a femtosecond laser-etched glass system.The ORC has begun collaborating with Microsoft Research on "Project Silica," which promises to develop zz-percentage glass. The ORC has begun working with Microsoft Research on "Project Silica," which promises to develop zb-scale storage systems and "fundamentally rethink how to build mass storage systems.
Writing on glass is no easy task, however, and standard pulsed UV or CO2 laser systems can create microcracks - excessive heating of the material's surface can lead to damage at thermal hot spots. While this can be circumvented by reducing the pulse energy, it's not ideal when high precision is required. That's why researchers are turning to ultrafast (femtosecond) laser systems to minimize the risk of thermal damage. The ultra-short duration of the high-energy pulse ensures that enough energy is delivered to the material to mark it with extreme precision, creating only minimal heat-affected zones and avoiding microcracks.
However, the current limitation of this technology is the extremely low rate at which data can be written, and writing Tb-scale data can take years to complete. Thankfully, ongoing breakthroughs are suggesting ways to increase data writing speeds. Last year, ORC researchers published an energy-efficient laser writing method in the journal Optica: not only is this method fast, but it can store about 500 Tb of data on CD-sized silica disks - they are 10,000 times denser than Blu-ray Disc storage technology.
The researchers' new method uses a 515-nm fiber laser with a repetition frequency of 10 MHz and a pulse duration of 250 fs to create tiny pits in the silica glass, which contain individual nanolamellar structures measuring just 500 × 50 nm.These high-density nanostructures can be used for long-term optical data storage. The researchers achieved a write speed of 1,000,000 voxels per second, which is equivalent to recording about 225 KB of data (more than 100 pages of text) per second.
The new method was used to write 5GB of text data onto a silicon glass disk the size of a conventional CD-ROM with near 100 percent read accuracy. Each voxel contains four bits of information, with every two voxels corresponding to one text character. Using the write density provided by the method, the disc will be able to hold 500 Tb of data. By upgrading the system for parallel writing, it should be feasible to write that much data in about 60 days, the researchers said.