Laser Ablation
Assembly Line
AI and lasers light the way to a manufacturing revolution
High-quality data is crucial because AI machine-learning systems need to be trained. A few thousand to a few tens of thousands of data points are often required for the algorithm to start making useful predictions. “We have constructed an all-automated and autonomous data acquisition system, called the Meister Data Generator,” says Yohei Kobayashi, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Solid State Physics. “We don’t even need to go to the lab to take data: it keeps working 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
The researchers have applied their idea to many laser production processes including, very recently, laser ablation: using a short pulse of light to remove a small amount of material from a surface. In this case, they created a high-quality dataset by firing light pulses of controllable duration at a solid target. A three-dimensional microscope then provided images for the corresponding surface changes at a rate of about one per minute, or a 1,000 data points in a day.
This big-data driven approach is proving very fruitful, and the University of Tokyo collaborators at Kyushu University in Fukuoka are already exploiting the method to serve the semiconductor manufacturing industry.