Mainz, Germany - Look down at your mobile phone; there’s a good chance the display screen glass was cut by a CO2 laser system developed, manufactured, and sold by MDI Schott Advanced Processing GmbH. Today’s ultra-slim cell phones require glass displays in the thickness range 0.4 to 1.0 mm, and the cut edges of the glass must be precise, strong, and splinter free.
MDI Schott API, a 2005 joint venture between Schott AG and Mitsuboshi Diamond Industrial Co., offers a range of glass cutting equipment but is featuring laser cutting because this process produces high-quality glass cuts using its “laser scribe and break” technology. This process, which produces practically no micro-particles, is typically used in a cleanroom atmosphere. The edge strength of these displays is three times higher compared to conventional scribing and thus enables the cell phone makers to create thinner cutting-edge products.
In this process, robots load cassettes with thin, 700mm x 900mm coated and laminated borosilicate glass plates onto a precision X/Y table, which moves the glass under a fixed Synrad 240W laser beam at speeds up to 300 mm/s. The beam scribes a fine line in the X direction, the width of the display, and after the entire plate is scribed the Y table motion moves the plate at 90° to produce the display length. After the scribes have been made the processed plate can be moved to a break station where the individual displays are broken apart. Alternately, as used in other applications, a gas jet can trail the scribing beam causing the glass to control fracture along the scribe line. Examples of this are glass slides used in the biomedical industry.
Laser systems’ flexibility and reliability are important factors in glass cutting; especially in the cell phone display sector where these machines are operated 24/7.
MDI Schott is proud of its unique ability to laser separate single glass layers with high edge quality, such as cover glasses for electronic mobile devices, which is now a trend away from the conventional plastic currently used in some products.
For more information on MDI Schott AP contact the company, [email protected].-DAB