Continuous-Wave Line Laser for Large Area Material Refinement

In a constantly evolving laser industry new and innovative applications of laser radiation are emerging – in scope as well as in numbers. While pulsed line-shaped laser beams are already well established as mainstream manufacturing tools in the production of flat panel displays, continuous-wave line beam processes are still in their infancy. Nevertheless, they have shown great potential in research & development laboratories as well as in pilot plants for various thermal material processing applications. At HelmholtzZentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB) the Helmholtz Innovation Lab HySPRINT operates an open-access laser laboratory where we jointly investigate new and innovative ideas of our cooperation partners and comprehensively evaluate them using a variety of analytical measurement methods on site. Our partners benefit from our profound knowledge on material refinement and analysis. We focus in particular on large area continuous-wave line laser processing of materials. This type of laser sources and the associated manufacturing processes feature essentially unlimited scalability in terms of area and throughput at low costs. So far, we concentrated our efforts on the crystallization of silicon films on foreign substrates offering such films with processes that are compatible to industrial mass production for applications requiring large area, high quality and low cost materials. However, we are open to explore a large variety of different materials.