Frequently Asked Questions

Laser Services draws on decades of experience working with top ceramic substrate suppliers, including Coorstek, CeramTec, and Kyocera. We understand ceramic substrates and can help you achieve your most-demanding goals for a substrate in terms of price, quality, yield, and performance.

Following are a few questions that often come up when working with ceramic substrates:

1. Which material is best suited to my application? How do I determine the level of quality needed?
Laser Services maintains a large inventory of ceramic substrates from many of the top materials suppliers in the industry. Our in-house application specialists are also quite familiar with critical material characteristics and how they compare for different materials. These senior application specialists are ready to offer advice and guidance on different material quality levels and how they impact your requirements. Since application issues vary greatly, you can simply detail your issues here and we will respond promptly.

2. What if I can't find my material solution in your inventory, or I only need a small run?
In addition to maintaining a broad selection of ceramic substrate materials, Laser Services works closely with leading materials suppliers for up-to-date knowledge on their different product availabilities. Laser Services prides itself on maintaining inventory on the most popular ceramic substrates in order to virtually eliminate lengthy lead times. Typical delivery times are days rather than weeks. We also help eliminate waste with flexible minimum-order requirements.

3. How do your prices compare to buying direct?
Our prices are very competitive because we buy in volume and maintain our own inventory. In addition, we offer very low minimum buys and can add tremendous value by providing all the processing necessary along with speedy delivery.

4. What are the quality issues I should be aware of?
We share a strong dedication to maintaining quality, and have learned to identify a number of factors that may endanger ceramic substrate quality. These include: excessive localized camber; poor flatness, camber, or parallelism; improper surface finish; material impurities; and mechanical and thermal stress.

5. Can you provide an example of how you helped someone overcome a substrate related problem?
A thick-film hybrid manufacturer approached Laser services with a yield problem for a product built on a semi-automated line. Yields were often only 70% or less. We reviewed the customer's specifications and saw an opportunity to reduce the amount of laser machining being performed on the substrates and introduced tightly controlled deep laser scribing instead, as a means of better preserving the structural integrity of each substrate. The customer implemented our set of recommendations, which reduced the cost of manufacturing by a factor of 4 to 1 and dramatically increased yields. The customer continues to run this product line, having realized thousands of dollars in savings on the cost of the substrates alone.