Significantly speeding coordinate measurement using 3D AOI

What’s New In Electronics Interview at SMT Hybrid Packaging, Nuremberg, Germany

Kim Sauer, WNIE TV with Sean Langbridge, Global Sales Director, CyberOptics

Q: Let’s talk about the market and what’s driving the development. We’re looking at quicker time to market. Everyone is looking at faster, more accurate, more precise, so you have solutions that cover those details.

A: We’re seeing a lot of applications now and a lot of drivers for a more measurement based approach to inspection so obviously 3D AOI is very important now in the industry and it has been growing strongly in the last 2-3 years. Our customers are starting to understand value that they can obtain from 3D AOI and that’s very accurate measurement in both X, Y and also in Z, height and we’ve taken that recently a step further to develop and provide some CMM type measurements. Coordinate Measurement Machines historically are quite slow, difficult to program but very accurate. What we’ve found is through our 3D-AOI development, we are able to serve the CMM measurement market which is starting to develop in SMT, but also exist also outside in general industry in metrology. We’re serving that very well with very high speed and very precise measurements from our 3D AOI system.

Q: So high precision is obviously key there, but the speed as to how fast you can convert the data into something useable must be amazing for the end-user then.

A: I can give you a practical example. We have one customer we served recently where they were using a traditional CMM solution and it was taking 5-6 hours for them to get a full inspection result from their component or circuit board. We were able to do that in less than a minutes. So this gives you the comparison. The value to the customer is of course they get the measurements much faster. They are able to do the analysis much faster. Make design change must faster. So the time to market for their product or time to implementation is much faster.

Q: What’s happening in the industry that feeds into industry 4.0 and this smart factory. There’s a huge amount of data that’s being created just on the inspection side. What sort of developments are you seeing as a company that takes that information and makes it part of the smart factory?

A: We’re seeing drivers for total line solutions where customers are thinking ahead and would like to see all the process tools in the line being able to communicate with each other and make recommendations for program assembly or process changes on the fly before a defect occurs. I think that’s the dream. I don’t think we have a reality right now, but I think customers believe that Industry 4.0 can take them on that journey. So, some of our key customers already are talking about direct feedback and using our measurement results from 3D SPI, 3D AOI post-placement, post-reflow and feeding that back to the production equipment. We have a customer now that’s using Mydata, My600 looking to change on the fly the actual jet paste if its insufficient or off-set slightly and feed that data back to the MY600 and make that change immediately. Customers are looking for corrective action on the fly without investigation trusting the process measurement tools to provide that data.

Q: So really part of the important overall puzzle of Industry 4.0.

A: Exactly.