Excimer lasers offer unmatched benefits for machining a wide range of materials. In particular, the short wavelength, high energy UV photons experience less diffraction than longer visible or infrared wavelengths, which enables materials processing at higher spatial resolution. This makes them the enabling technology to fast and effective large area UV annealing and ablation for OLED and MicroLED display applications.

Thin film deposition or processing with excimer lasers is the enabling and often performance determining manufacturing step in many high-tech markets and applications. The success formula for any technology is bridging the gap between depositing, microstructuring or modifying a thin film and achieving industrial processing rates, yield and throughput.

Most important for process reproducibility, next to shortest possible ablation wavelength, is a stable behavior of consecutive laser pulses as well as the homogeneity of the on-sample laser fluency. These requirements constitute the superiority of excimer lasers as pulsed UV laser sources when it comes to precision and reproducibility in pulsed laser deposition. Recent progress in excimer laser design and UV optical performance will be introduced.