Silicon is widely used in a number of industries but primarily in solar cells and in semiconductor manufacture, with growing applications in jewelry and entertainment goods. In the majority of applications the source material is in the form of wafers which are typically 0.2-1.5mm (thick and 100-300mm diameter. From the flat faces of the octagons they laser cut a flat rectangular wafer that is then further processed to become a solar cell. Cutting speed and yield are important to reducing costs. The main requirements for cutting of silicon wafers are dross free and crack free cut edges in a range of thicknesses.
The cutting trials have been performed in a range of thicknesses with two different laser sources i.e. with a high beam quality CW single mode fiber laser and also with a high beam quality pulsed Nd: YAG laser. Considering the differences in beam quality and pulsed performance between the two types of laser, there are different operating regimes for the two types of laser. The lamp-pumped YAG laser is characterised by long high-energy pulses but poorer beam quality, and the fibre laser with high repetition rate on-off type modulation, single-mode beam quality but low pulse energy. From an applications perspective, both these regimes have their advantages and these are discussed in the following sections.