The thickness of the glass substrate used in LCD's continues to be decreased from its original thickness of 1.1mm for the purpose reducing size & weight. The aim of this study was to clarify the influence of the glass substrate thickness during laser scribing with crack propagation caused by laser heating followed by quick quenching. The laser scribe conditions for soda-lime glass substrates with thickness equal to or less than 1.1 mm were obtained in laser irradiation experiments. Two-dimensional thermal elasticity analysis was conducted with a finite element method based on the scribable conditions obtained in the experiment. The laser scribable conditions can then be estimated by the upper limit of the maximum surface temperature, Tmax, & the lower limit of maximum tensile stress, stmax, in the cooling area, regardless of the glass substrate thickness. There is a substrate thickness with which the maximum tensile stress stmax becomes the largest under each scribe condition. The substrate thickness with which stmax becomes the largest is obtained at a faster scribe velocity for thinner glass substrate and at slower scribe velocity for thicker glass substrate. Owing to these relations, the crack depth also has almost the same tendency as stmax.
