UV laser ablation of polyimide is a combination of photochemical and photothermal mechanism. Photochemical mechanism is that molecular bonds are broken by photon energy and photothermal is evaporation and melt expulsion. When the laser processing, the etching depth needs to be calculated for prediction of processing result. In this paper, in order to predict the laser etching depth of polyimide by UV laser with the wavelength of 355nm, the theoretical model which includes both the photothermal and the photochemical effect was introduced. The model parameters were obtained by comparing with experimental results. The 3rd harmonic $Nd:YVO_4$ laser system was used in the experiment. From these experimental and theoretical results, the laser ablation of a polyimide was verified to achieve the highest quality microstructure.