Cutting glass into favourable sizes can either be done by hand or with a scribe and break tool.

An Industrial automatic cutting machine, Mitsuboshi MP500, is available. This machine can cut sodalime and/or borosilicate glass varying from 0.1 to 1.1 mm thickness. The dimensions of the glass can vary between 50x50mm to 500x500mm. It can cut glass in any shape (even round!), and has the possibility to cut double glassplates (bipanes). The special cuttingwheel initiates an almost through and through cutline, the breakage of the glass is therefore very easy!

Powder erosion

Powder erosion also known as powder blasting is a technology which can be used to realize  3-dimensional structures in substrates such as glass and ceramics. The principle of this technology is illustrated in figure 1. A powder is accelerated to speeds in the range of 100 m/s and it impedes the surface of the substrate which can be partly covered with a masking material. In this way intricate structures can be made in the substrate into the tenth of micrometer range. The mechanism of material removal consists of the initiation of cracks (figure 2) and the subsequent removal of the separated material. Fig. 1 Fig. 2a Fig. 2b   Fig. 3 In Device Processing we have a large laboratory powder erosion machine (Figure 3) and a number of smaller ones which are used for developing new applications and doing small series of high quality powder erosion products as are shown in Figure 4.   Fig. 4 By optimization of the process MEMS level products can be realized in glasses and substrates.  As an example, Figure 5 shows two micrometer level channel structures obtained by an oblique erosion process. Fig. 5

Dicing

Dicing is used to cut/dice, fully automatically, several materials such as silicon, glass and ceramics.
DPF is equipped with a Disco DAD 561 dicing machine. This machine can be used with substrates up to 6 inch in diameter.
Substrates can be cut through or out. The cut quality (chipping, roughness), cut accuracy (cut with, cut depth, position)
and minimum influence on material properties are advantages of dicing with respect to other conventional techniques.
 
Dicing capabilities:

Dicing of up to 6" wafers or partials, which do not exceed 6" in its longest dimension.
Dicing of various materials including Si, Glass, ceramics, metals, synthetic materials, bonded stacks and PCB.

The blade that is used depends on the material that has to be diced. We have a large number of blade types with different properties:

• Hard or soft binder with a SD (synthetic diamante) or CBN (cubic boron nitride) abrasive and a grain size of 2-100µm.
• Blade thickness 15 µm - several mm's
• Cutting speed 0.05 - 300 mm/s
• Ratio blade thickness/dice depth of 15 can be achieved
• Dicing accuracy of 0.1 µm is possible

Laser cutting

With a number of CO2 and NdYAG (1064 and 532 nm) laser systems we are able to perform a wide range of processes (e.g. cutting, ablation) on glass as well as on other various materials (metal, ceramics, plastics, etc.).

Wet etching Besides machine performed glass processing, it is possible with the help of photolithography and wet chemical etching to pattern directly into your glass. Etchants that can be used depending on the type of glass and application are: 2% HF ( glass surface cleaning), BOE etchant (Buffered Oxide Etch) or HBF4.