SYNRAD, INC. - http://www.synrad.com  
Thursday, September 16, 2004
Issue 96

SYNRAD's sealed CO₂ lasers are used in a variety of industrial processes including cutting, welding, drilling, and marking. This news brief showcases some of the interesting materials and products that are processed daily by Synrad's line of CO₂ lasers and marking heads.

Marking printed circuit boards (PCBs) is a process typically performed on the face of the board, either on the FR4 material itself or, in some cases, directly on the solder mask. This unique application however, involved identifying circuit boards by marking a code on the edge of the board.

Due to the thin cross section of the board, 0.062” (1.6 mm), we installed an 80-mm focusing lens on an FH Series marking head. The 80 mm lens provides a small 116-micron (0.005”) spot size with a 0.8-mm (0.032”) depth of focus.

The eight-character identification code was created using WinMark Pro’s ‘Simple” stroke font and sized to just fit the edge of the board. At a Power setting of 25 watts and a marking Velocity of 15 inches per second, we marked the ID number in a cycle time of 0.11 seconds.

Marking Anodized Aluminum Labels

Marking anodized aluminum is another classic CO₂ laser application. During marking, the pigment in the anodize coating is essentially “bleached” by the CO₂ beam leaving the protective coating intact.

The goal of this application was to mark anodized aluminum labels using 40 watts of power while fully ablating the black anodize coating. The eight digit serial number in the upper anodized rectangle was created using a filled TrueType® font (Arial) at a Text Height of 0.165”. Next, a UCC-128 linear barcode, created at a Barcode Height value of 0.2”, was positioned in the lower rectangle. Because the barcode appears lighter than the surrounding background, the Barcode Inverted property was set to Yes. Finally, a human-readable text object, created using one of WinMark Pro’s built-in stroke fonts, was placed below the 1D barcode.

Marking was accomplished using an FH Series marking head driven by WinMark Pro laser marking software. A 125 mm focusing lens was chosen since it provided the smallest possible spot size with a mark field large enough to contain all three mark objects on the label. All objects were marked using 40 watts of power at a Velocity of 2.5 inches per second with a Resolution value of 300. Overall cycle time to mark the linear barcode and filled text objects was 23.77 seconds. After marking was complete, the barcode was verified using a Microscan MS-Q Quadrus Handheld Imager.

Notice that WinMark Pro versions 4.1.0.4368 and above provide an important feature for handling multiple serialized objects contained within a mark file. In this example, the text string in the upper rectangle is entered via a keyboard, serial port, or text file; however, the text caption for the barcode and human-readable text are assigned values from the first text object automatically. This Auto Text Type automation feature, From Another Object, and a related property, Assign From, allow you to link, or assign, the text caption from one object to another object or objects in the mark file. These properties help to eliminate the possibility of data entry errors when manually entering the same information for multiple objects, ensuring that sets of data remain synchronized.

Cutting Synthetic Woven Fabric

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