Scaling femtosecond laser micromachining toward higher throughput while preserving processing quality remains a fundamental challenge. Increasing pulse energy alone does not lead to proportional gains in ablation efficiency due to nonlinear energy deposition, plasma shielding, and heat accumulation effects. Burst-mode operation, particularly in the MHz and GHz intra-burst regimes, provides an alternative pathway to tailor laser–material interaction dynamics and overcome these limitations.

In this work, we investigate the influence of burst-mode parameters, including intra-burst spacing, sub-pulse number, burst envelope shape, and BiBurst configurations, on micromachining performance across metals, semiconductors, transparent dielectrics, crystals, and polymers.  MHz bursts, with approximately 15 ns spacing, are shown to enhance ablation efficiency in metals by maintaining near-optimal fluence conditions for individual pulses while reducing plasma shielding. This enables higher average power processing while preserving surface quality. In contrast, tightly spaced GHz bursts, 200 to 400 ps, introduce strong plasma–light coupling and controlled heat accumulation, which can either enhance removal rates in transparent materials or enable surface remelting for improved finish in metals and polymers.

For glass and fused silica, GHz bursts significantly increase specific removal rates and enable high-speed deep drilling, including nearly taperless holes in sub-millimeter samples and rapid drilling in centimeter-scale thicknesses using long-GHz burst regimes. In silicon, combining MHz and GHz structures in a BiBurst configuration leads to removal rate improvements of up to threefold compared to single-pulse processing.