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24 SMT Magazine • June 2017 by Stephen Las Marias I-CONNECT007 In an interview with SMT Magazine during the recent NEPCON China event in Shanghai, Guido Bornemann, head of sales in Asia for Vis- com, talks about how the inspection technol- ogy is keeping up with the latest requirements and demands from customers. He also explains why 3D technology is the best inspection tech- nology to utilize in electronics assembly. Stephen Las Marias: Guido, what are the great- est challenges that your customers are facing right now? Guido Bornemann: Right now, there is a lot of energy going into avoiding false calls. If you look back five years ago, mainly the automo- tive industry needed to find all the defects and false calls, and things like false alarms were not so important. We still find all the defects there, but now they don't want to the risk for false calls. That means we have to find all the defects at zero false calls, because every false call is a po- tential escapee. The machine is correct, but the operator may be classifying it as a false effect. So, the challenge is to find all the defects at the highest yield rate. Las Marias: How are you helping your custom- ers do that? Bornemann: 3D, of course, is the way to go. The more information you get, the easier it will be, and there are a lot of features we are just intro- ducing, such as the 360-degree view. That means we're taking 2D, 2.5D pictures from all angles, and we are displaying them on the classification station of the machine. It means the operators don't really need to be present at the machine, but can see the whole view on the monitor and then classify properly and correctly. Las Marias: Before, people aren't giving too much of a though on inspection. What drove them to increasingly integrate inspection sys- tems into their SMT assembly lines? Bornemann: If you look back a couple of years ago, people didn't consider inspection because there's no value add in it, or it's really late ROI. Inspection, in general, was basically just, "Let's put it to ensure that I only deliver perfect prod- 3D Inspection Is the Way to Go FEATURE INTERVIEW