Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1202019
64 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2020 veloped this solution based on emerging mar- ket demand. Since we have a reputation of a company that can develop a complex AOI so- lution quickly, we have customers coming to us and asking us to meet that specific demand. We have big hopes for this system. Matties: More and more HDI work is taking place. Is that what you see as driving the an- ticipation for this? Kaplan: Yes. As far as inspection goes, as I men- tioned before, laser via inspection is a big part of it. Years ago, it used to be sampling purely for some calibration purposes. Right now, com- panies are pushing 100% inspection, which is why we focus on that, so there is a big, new inspection market for us out there. Matties: The market has been down in Asia for a bit over the last few months. What do you see now? Kaplan: We see a lot of optimism. Based on the attendance of these shows, we don't see a downturn but the opposite. People are expect- ing a ramp up, and we feel like the market is picking up. Matties: There's a lot of talk about 5G. Is it a driving factor based on the conversations you're having? Kaplan: It's a big component of it, and there's a lot of anticipation. China is moving ahead of the rest of the world in 5G. There is a lot of government encouragement and investment in this area, so it's going to help all of us. Matties: Absolutely. One of the other pieces of equipment you have is for inspection, and another is a verifica- tion system. Kaplan: This is a new type of verifica- tion system called VVR, which stands for virtual verification and repair. The idea is to make verification more ef- ficient than it used to be. This system is a combination of virtual and physi- cal verification. By virtual verification, I mean grabbing defects' images from the AOI machine and feeding them to our verification station. The first step is to go through those images to quickly filter out obvious false calls. The de- fects' pictures that VVR operator sees are post- processed grey-level images from AOI, but you can't tell that they are. Those images look just like a video with very natural color. We can achieve that natural look by using our unique post-processing technology that runs on every image grabbed by AOI. This way, VVR opera- tors can see all the defects in a matrix, and in 90% of cases, can easily tell which are false calls and which are true defects. The idea is to give an operator the opportu- nity to look at all of those images at once. They can set up as many as they want on one screen and choose those that they want to have a clos- er look at. For example, if they see a potential defect, such as something that could be either dust or a pinhole, they simply click to move the live video to that area. Then, they make a final judgment on whether it's a defect or not. This sequence makes verification much faster and more efficient. In the past, we had to use multiple verifi- cation stations, but now, we can replace sev- eral of them with just one such system. In addition, we can upgrade our existing verifi- cation station called CVR that is used as just CIMS' Virtual Verification and Repair (VVR) system combines verification of AOI post-processed images with live video mode.