<title>Excimer laser in industrial material processing</title>

Abstract

Excimer laser have developed from physicists' 'toys' to powerful manufacturing tools, offering unique benefits to a wide range of applications. Nearly all technical and biological/medical materials can be structured by the intensive UV light. In the year 1997 the number of installations on manufacturing floors will be much higher than ever before. Besides the medical uses the most important applications are DUV lithography, TFT annealing for flat panel displays and microdrilling of hole arrays, especially for ink jet printer heads and or microelectronics packaging. This paper will present three main reasons of this breakthrough: The first is in the regard to the performance of the excimer laser itself. Technology developments by laser manufacturers have resulted in remarkable improvements in component lifetime, reliability, cost of ownership and ease of use. With gas lifetimes in excess of 10⁸ pulses, laser tube exchange intervals longer than 5 X 10⁹ pulses and integration of internal halogen generators quasi sealed-off excimer laser with hands-free operation are accomplished. The actually introduced NovaLine technology combines the experience of more than 4000 installed excimer laser with a completely new laser engineering. The second topic is a much more efficient way of using the UV photons. Progress in UV optics will be demonstrated with advanced approaches for beam delivery systems for i) drilling of interconnections in electronic packaging, ii) processing of micronozzle arrays for ink jet printers, and iii) line-beam-optics for scanning applications, especially for annealing of TFT's for AMLCD flat panel displays. The final reason is the achieved application performance itself, which will be shown with actual results.