Modular vision system eases printed circuit board traceability
Today's portable cell phones, tablets, and electronic devices require increasingly smaller printed circuit board (PCB) footprints. To take advantage of this legacy semiconductor equipment while at the same time increasing the throughput of smaller PCBs, manufacturers have turned to a process known as panelization. Here, a number of identical circuit boards are printed onto a large panel that can be handled by existing equipment. After processing, these panels are then separated for final testing. In order to inspect these boards, Microscan developed a line-scan based machine vision system known as PanelScan, which eases the task of reading barcodes—which are used as unique identifiers—on multiple circuit boards in PCB panel.>>>Read more
James Carroll
Former VSD Editor James Carroll joined the team 2013. Carroll covered machine vision and imaging from numerous angles, including application stories, industry news, market updates, and new products. In addition to writing and editing articles, Carroll managed the Innovators Awards program and webcasts.