Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1202019
JANUARY 2020 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 65 physical verification with this kind of sys- tem. That takes some hardware and software upgrade but can potentially be done for the entire existing CVR install base. We have hun- dreds of systems in the market that can be upgraded. Matties: The process flow begins with the board in the AOI system. When it's detected as questionable, the board is moved to the verifi- cation system, where all the imaging is com- municated, and the operator can make deter- minations. Then, it moves from one machine to the next. What you're talking about is key to the digital factory. How are you plugging this information—and your Industry 4.0 strategy— into the marketplace? Kaplan: By doing this, we can save all the im- ages of the defects and feed them into the da- tabase in real time. We can also store them and analyze them in the future. If AI becomes a reality, it can be fed directly to some kind of AI module that does all the judgment instead of humans doing it. Whether you can replace 100% of human verification with some sort of AI is still an open question, so VVR can serve as a stepping-stone towards this goal. Keep in mind that we can store those images and give access not only to customers but even to a third party that the customer may hire for building AI or other apps on top of it. This would fit very nicely into the whole concept of the digital factory, where we store data that is traceable. You can go back, look at it again, and figure out trends in quality issues in real time. Matties: With the images that they see on the verification system, is that something that's going to improve the group or yields because they're making better decisions? Kaplan: There is some component of that, but mainly, the system improves the entire effi- ciency of an AOI cycle, so you can get mul- tiple benefits. One is that you don't need that many verification stations. Customers can pass boards much faster out of the AOI room be- cause they're going to verify them faster. Veri- fication usually is a bottleneck of an AOI cycle. Plus, you can store all the data as an added benefit. In the past, once you did verification, all this data was gone because it was a live video that you could only look at once. Now, we can store all that data and feed it to the next process. Matties: This is the system that's well-suited for anywhere in the world, and a quickturn fabri- cator would benefit from a system like this. Kaplan: Absolutely. Matties: AOI is typically a batch process. Is this something that you see moving into inline pro- cessing? For example, is there a demand for a lot size of one when where the board comes out of a DES line, and we see inline AOI in- spection for continuous flow manufacturing? Kaplan: There's a demand for inline AOI, but we see this demand mainly in the lower end of the market. Of course, everybody would like to have faster AOI and be able to connect directly to the DES line; a lot of companies are doing that. We don't see it happening in the higher end, and that's our focus—IC substrates and HDI. The type of inline AOI that we see from AOI vendors focusing on the lower end of the PCB market has a lot of limitations. The truth is that you can't really connect it directly to the DES line because you would be putting a sensitive optical system in a very acidic envi- ronment. The AOI machine has a lot of very fine components, optics, and mechanics that Close up of live video verification screen.