Introduction and Organization of the Book

Abstract

Regardless of the specific application or context, why is the role of computer vision so essential in electronics manufacturing? The following prime reasons must be put forward:

• 1. The ever-decreasing physical dimensions of all parts, patterns, and defects; the tight tolerances; and the higher layer counts make it increasingly impossible for humans to carry out inspection and parts measurement, at least with the speed required by manufacturing throughput (Figure 1).

• 2. Computer vision is mandatory as an in-process “auditing” facility, to help understand why, how, and where the defects or quality losses occurred, and ultimately in order to improve upon the process itself.

• 3. The trend toward application of specific designs, with smaller production runs of each item, gives versatile vision systems a major advantage over single-purpose test systems.

• 4. The processing power and price of specific or generic vision systems for electronics manufacturing have finally fallen into more reasonable ranges, especially as increasing portions of the inspection algorithms can be executed economically by fast vision-dedicated hardware (digital signal processors, array processing chips, pipelined processors, concurrent/parallel processors, and systolic and other arrays).