With over 20 years'' experience, Carlsbad, CA-based Asymtek designs and manufactures a full line of equipment for semiconductor package assembly, printed circuit board assembly, optoelectronics assembly, and precision industrial manufacturing.
As the technology of the electronics industry advances and improves, the scale of components used has consistently grown smaller. This allows for more efficient use of resources: a silicon chip that once held hundreds of transistors now holds millions. However, as advances lead to decreases in the scale of components, similar breakthroughs need to be made in the assembly of these components.
Asymtek turned to machine vision and Coreco Imaging (now DALSA Coreco) to meet these challenges head on with its fluid dispensing equipment, including syringes equipped with needles or jets that dispense such fluids as solder and glue. Two important applications for the machine are underfill, which pulls the heat away from a semiconductor chip placed on a board, and encapsulation, a process that covers a chip and keeps air off it, leading to less corrosion and greater structural integrity.
In these applications, the system must guide the fluid dispensing head to a precise target. Imagine guiding this process "blind" -- that is, without seeing the surface that the fluid needs to be placed on -- an almost impossible task. Machine vision lets the dispensing head see where the head needs to go, and then moves it to the exact position to dispense the fluid. The motion control setup, which positions the board on the conveyor, goes hand-in-hand with the machine vision system to make inspection as accurate and repeatable as possible.
Asymtek boosted the power and usability of its dispensing equipment by adopting a machine vision system as a standard feature on its Century, Millennium, and new Axiom 1010 dispensing platforms. The vision engine, produced by Coreco, provides an enhanced pattern recognition system. Among the key components: high-speed CCD cameras, Coreco''s PCVision image processors, and Coreco''s Sapera software to automatically correct workpiece misalignment.
Together with Asymtek''s software, the Coreco vision engine can take a series of measurements to find die edges and calculate the corner of the die. The vision engine provides several enhancements to Asymtek''s pattern recognition systems as demonstrated by an increase in speed of up to 30 % for detection of standard reference marks. Customers experience greater throughput and yield as a result of the faster image processing and more robust image analysis.
These results have earned Asymtek Intel''s prestigious Supplier Continuous Quality Improvement (SCQI) award, its highest honor for its suppliers, for the past three years.