The economical potential of micro-systems has already been shown in application fields such as telecommunication, traffic, medicine and automatic control engineering. Historically, most of these systems were developed using silicon as base material. The shaping of this material is done by lithographic and etching processes. Both, the base material and the production technique do impose restrictions on general applications of these systems. To get a broader acceptance of micro-systems in all technical fields, it is necessary to explore cost efficient production techniques for a manifold selection of materials. In view of that goal, this contribution will discuss laser micro-machining of ceramics and steel with q-switched and continuously operated solid-state lasers.
Using different systems with frequency up-conversion, the influence of wavelength and pulse duration on ablation behaviour of ceramics will be shown. To get a deeper insight into the ablation of ceramics the results of transmission-experiments and in-situ-visualization of the process will be discussed.
For steel, the precision of micro-machining by laser radiation is mainly limited by the appearance of melt. To avoid the detrimental melt production, a reactive laser process by using oxygen was investigated. The material and machining parameters were optimized to achieve a high ablation rate as well as a low roughness of the structures. Some examples are demonstrating the accessible dimensions of these micro-structures, and the galvanic moulding as a possible technical application will be presented.