Glass Microfabrication

Because of the unique properties of glass, more industries are moving their products to glass so they can benefit from these unique properties. Nevertheless, they are finding that the current traditional fabrication techniques used to machine these materials have limitations such as restricted miniaturization, a huge need for post-processing to meet the requirement which increases overall cost.

Citrogene’s engineers developed the Citrogene Solution™ to address these issues. The Citrogene Solution enables the fabrication of high-precision features required for these micro-mechanics devices and the process allows to extract the microstructures and/or micro-components from the host material with little or no damage to the extracted parts or the host material.

The Citrogene Solution is a proprietary process, this process utilizes an advanced solid-state ultrafast laser and a specially designed post-processing method that enables Citrogene to preform high precision micro-machining on brittle materials, that is fast, cost-effective and scalable. The Citrogene Solution produces clean parts of almost any shape with no debris, maintains the high bend strength of the glass, produces near vertical cut surfaces and these cut surfaces have a surface roughness in most case of less than 600 nm.

Using the Citrogene Solution enables to machine a super 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. Also, we can process wafers as thin as 30 µm and as thick as 3 mm and wafer sizes up to 300 mm.