Due to the unique properties of glass, more and more industries are shifting their products to glass to benefit from these unique properties. However, they note that the current traditional manufacturing techniques used to machine these materials have limitations such as: B. limited miniaturization, a huge need for post-processing to meet the requirements, which increases the overall cost.
The engineers of Citrogene have developed the Citrogene Solution™ to address these issues. The Citrogene solution enables the manufacture of high-precision features required for these micromechanical substrates. The method allows the microstructures and/or microcomponents to be created from the base material with little or no damage to the extracted parts or the base material.
The Citrogene solution is a proprietary process. This process uses an advanced ultra-fast solid-state laser and a specially designed post-processing method that Citrogene enables high-precision micromachining to be performed on brittle materials that is fast, inexpensive, and scalable. The Citrogene solution produces clean parts of almost any shape without deposits, maintains the high flexural strength of the glass, produces near-vertical cut surfaces, and these cut surfaces have a surface roughness of less than 600 nm in most cases.
The use of the Citrogene solution enables the machining of a very wide range of brittle materials such as quartz, fused silica, borofloat, soda lime, alkali-free barium boroaluminosilicate, aluminosilicate and borosilicate from all major suppliers worldwide. We can also process wafers up to 30 µm thick and up to 3 mm thick and wafer sizes up to 300 mm.
