Patent ID: 8178818

Claim:
A laser processing system comprising: a beam positioning system to align beam delivery coordinates relative to a workpiece, the beam positioning system generating position data corresponding to the alignment; a pulsed laser source; a beamlet generation module to receive a laser pulse from the pulsed laser source, and to generate from the laser pulse a beamlet array comprising a plurality of beamlet pulses; a beamlet modulator to modulate the amplitude of each beamlet pulse in the beamlet array; and beamlet delivery optics to focus the modulated beamlet array onto one or more targets at locations on the workpiece corresponding to the position data; wherein the beamlet generation module comprises a discretely banded reflectivity plate comprising: a first surface comprising a first plurality of respectively reflective bands; and a second surface comprising a second plurality of respectively reflective bands; wherein the first surface is configured to: receive the laser pulse into the discretely banded reflectivity plate; and successively reflect diminishing portions of the laser pulse received from the second surface back into the discretely banded reflectivity plate toward the second surface; and wherein the second surface is configured to: successively transmit a first part and reflect a second part of the diminishing portions of the laser pulse received from the first surface, the transmitted first part corresponding to respective beamlet pulses in the beamlet array.