Laser technology makes the era of flexible electronics accessible

With the rapid development of science and technology in recent years, electronic smart products, from mobile phones, tablets to watches and glasses, are constantly refreshing people's eyeballs in both shape and function, and also bring new feelings to users.

Evolution of Electronic Product Demand and Increased Application of FPC Softboard

Modern society is closely related to electronic technology. The miniaturization and lightening of products are demanded by miniature mobile phones, portable computers, memory, hard disk drives, CD drives, automotive electronic products and so on. In order to meet this challenge, a flexible circuit, which can be used in three-dimensional electronic assembly and can be bent into numerous required shapes, has emerged as the times require.

What is FPC?

FPC is a graphical printed circuit board made of flexible substrates. It has the characteristics of high wiring density, light weight and thin thickness. FPC is mainly used in mobile phones, laptops, PDA, digital cameras, LCM and other products, especially for applications with complex circuits, high signal processing requirements or special electrical or mechanical properties.

Deficiencies of traditional processing methods

For FPC cutting, the traditional processing method is to open the die, and then press through the die. This kind of processing method is a contact type of mechanical processing, so there will inevitably be some shortcomings:

Because of the continuous improvement of line density and pitch of FPC products, as well as the complexity of FPC graphics, it is more and more difficult to make FPC dies.

Because of the shortcomings of mechanical processing itself, the FPC die can not reach a high precision surface, which restricts the further improvement of FPC processing accuracy.

Because traditional FPC cutting is a contact machining method, it will inevitably produce processing stress on FPC, which may cause physical damage to FPC.

Advantages of Laser Processing Technology

The principle of FPC laser cutting machine is to use 355 nm ultraviolet short wavelength laser beam to scan the FPC surface, so that high-energy ultraviolet photons can directly destroy the molecular bonds on the surface of flexible materials to achieve the purpose of material removal. Ultraviolet laser processing belongs to'cold processing'. This kind of'cold'photoetched parts have small heat affected zone, smooth edges and minimum carbonization, which can ensure the optimal quality of processed FPC products.

Laser processing mode is non-contact processing, and the heat affected zone of parts is small in the process of processing.

The high performance ultraviolet laser has the advantages of small focus spot, uniform power distribution, small thermal effect, small slit width and high cutting quality.

Precision two-dimensional worktable and full-closed-loop CNC system are adopted to ensure that micron-scale high precision is maintained while fast cutting is carried out.

Position sensor and CCD image positioning technology, automatic positioning and focusing, make positioning fast and accurate, save time and heart, high efficiency.