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42 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2019 Interview by Barry Matties I-CONNECT007 CIMS is a company well-known in the PCB industry for its automated optical inspection (AOI) solutions. At this year's CPCA Show, Marketing and Technical Director Vladi Kaplan spoke to Barry Matties about a number of add- ons CIMS designed to further enhance their AOI capabilities and systems. Vladi described their Virtual Verification Station (VVS)—a serv- er that pulls images of defects from the AOI as well as additional defect data collection, me- trology, and classification capabilities—CIMS Quality Center (CQC), and Software Develop- ment Kit (SDK) as well as trends he sees with laser via inspection. Barry Matties: Vladi, you are introducing a new product at the 2019 CPCA Show. Can you tell us about that? Vladi Kaplan: Yes, our product is the Virtual Verification Station (VVS), and it is designed to reduce physical verification. The idea is to look at the images as seen by AOI in an inter- mediate stage before the board goes to physi- cal verification on the verification stations and remove most of the false calls. In many cases, the image can easily tell the user if there's oxi- dation, something that looks like dust, or de- fects in areas that you're less concerned about. Then, you can remove them from verification, and everything that goes to physical verifica- tion will be either real defects or defects that you want to have a closer look at or you're unsure about based on an AOI-grabbed image. We've also built it to show you simulated color images that are almost indistinguishable from video images of verification stations, al- though it is still a grabbed image from AOI. It's not straightforward colorization like taking a black and white picture and making it colored; this process is much smarter than that. We use complex AI-based algorithms to make the im- ages look natural, making it easier to figure out if it's a real defect or a false call. This technol- ogy relies on many factors that enable the VVS to find the most optimal way to colorize vari- ous images. If you look at those images, you can't tell if either they're video or simulated. Another thing I want to highlight is the au- tomatic classification. At this stage, we can classify critical defects, such as opens, shorts, etc. The next generation of the software will Virtual Verification Station From CIMS Enhances AOI Capabilities Vladi Kaplan