The LPKF Vitrion systems are designed according to the needs of your industry and meets all the requirements for cleanliness, safety, and automation. Our systems come with the ability to perform the full spectrum of functionality and work packages required to use the LIDE technology to its full potential. This ability allows targeting different applications in your products with unmatched accuracy, quality and cost efficiency.

Glass as an engineering material

Glass has some interesting material properties:

• High-temperature and chemical stability
• High strength/weight ratio
• Homogeneous isotropic material
• Tunable coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE)
• Excellent electrical insulator
• Excellent RF properties
   

That is why glass is a uniquely interesting material for various applications in semiconductor manufacturing such as interposer with various advantages over silicon-based ones, semiconductor packaging applications such as for MEMS, and many others.
Besides its unique material properties, the commercial availability of glass in a high variety and high quality for comparably low cost, make it a preferred candidate material for matching cost and supply line requirements of the industry.

LIDE - Laser Induced Deep Etching

With LIDE, structures with aspect ratios in the range of 1:10 –1:50 can now be produced in thin glass at a previously unobtainable quality, processing speed and, therefore, cost, making it a highly economical solution with high throughput capabilities.

In the first step, the glass is patterned by a single laser pulse. This is done in a direct-write manner without lithography and without removing any glass at this stage, according to the desired layout. In the second process step, while the entire glass surface is wet etched isotropically in a batch process, the laser-modified regions of the glass are removed at a much faster rate than the unmodified ones. In this way, microstructures are created with very high precision and accuracy, completely free of defects, in a highly cost-effective manner.
With LIDE, a wide variety of structures such as through-holes (or through glass vias, TGV) or blind holes, cut-outs, cavities, grooves, and other features, can be introduced into the glass substrate within the same process step.