Automated Visual Inspection for Manufacturing Process Control with Application to Electronic Assembly

The current practice of manual inspection of solder joints in electronic manufacturing is very costly and not very effective. It has been anticipated that automated inspection systems would be developed for this application that would yield great productivity gains, coupled with substantial cost savings over manual inspection. However, the few automated systems for this task that have been placed on the market have not met these expectations because of characteristic limitations in their underlying technology. New fundamental technical approaches need to be developed to solve this problem and produce effective automated inspection systems for this important application.