WNIE TV Interview with Sean Langbridge at SMT Connect

Kim Sauer from WNIE TV catches up with Sean Langbridge, European Sales Director, CyberOptics at SMT Connect in Nuremberg, Germany

KS: I’m Kim Sauer from WNIE TV. Sean it’s great to see you once again at another show. Over the last three days you’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with the customers at your stand and from those conversations and watching the market, what are people looking for at the moment?

SL: Walking around the exhibition, you’ll notice just about everyone has 3D on their stand, so 3D AOI, SPI and I think the whole market is moving quickly to 3D inspection and 3D measurements. Most of our customers are interested in what our technology is capable of, what differentiates us from our competitors, so that’s been our discussions.

KS: So tell me about the differentiators.

SL: CyberOptics’ strength, our core competency is our sensing technology. We’re unique in a lot of areas – solid state digital optics, calibration-free, no maintenance MRS sensors. Our focus has been creating the most flexible, most accurate and fastest high-speed 3D sensor available to the market. What we have at our booth is the 3D MRS-Enabled SQ3000 Multi-function system. This has the same MRS sensor, same platform, same software that enables us to support 3D AOI, 3D SPI and 3D metrology. It can also inspect and measure plastic parts or metal parts with the same machine – no hardware or software changes. That’s unique.

KS: Is that targeted at specific market segments or particular type of customers?

SL: Yes it is. General SMT inspection we serve of course, back-end semiconductor packaging inspection, wire bonding inspection and measurement. There’s a migration, merger if you will, of SMT and semiconductor, so we’re looking at more packaging applications – chip-on-board, wire-bond and these type of what we call advanced packaging applications.

KS: We’re in 2019 and it’s a Productronica year as well. Are you going to continue to focus on the German market and be present at Productronica – maybe new solutions that we can get a hint of?

SL: Absolutely, our focus is to continue developing 3D sensors – higher resolution, higher speed – so yes, we’ll be at Productronica and the German market is very important to us, the automotive market is important in Europe and it’s one of our key segments.

KS: I’m sure I’ll bump into you out there. Thanks very much for your time.

SL: Thanks Kim.