EFA Picture
The trend towards miniaturization of electronic components continues unabated. Components are more efficient with the same design and new, smaller designs are ready for the market. This makes both the production of smaller printed circuit boards possible and the production of printed circuit boards with significantly higher packing densities. In any case, with the miniaturization trend, the requirements for the design and production of printed circuit boards increase inversely proportional to the size of the installed component!
Problems of miniaturization
The smaller the component size the higher the requirements for the resolution of an inspection system. Therefore, it is not surprising that more and more microscopes are being used to specifically examine individual components.
The bigger, though component density The more complex the search for the correct component on the printed circuit board. This search limits not only to the printed circuit board, but also to the Bestückdruck! Because it contains the necessary information for a successful inspection.
A steadily increasing component density inevitably leads to a constantly increasing inspection effort, if the principle of inspection is not fundamentally changed!
The EFA principle!
To solve this dilemma, EFA relies on a combination of software and hardware solutions!
In the first step, the hardware solutions enable the creation of a overall microscopic image from the printed circuit board in the necessary resolution.
In the second step, the software solutions use the method of Augmented reality for the projection of the placement pressure on the overall microscopic image.
In step 3, inherent grouping features, such as the part number of a component, are used by the software to jointly evaluate the same components.
This type of inspection is called Augmented reality inspection according to part numbers designates and allows the efficient inspection of densely packed printed circuit boards with components that can also accept microscopic sizes!
The "EFA Picture" series
Successful inspection therefore requires an increase in miniaturization overall microscopic image from the circuit board. So a picture of the complete circuit board and not only of a narrowly limited field of view similar to the view through the eyepiece of a microscope!
For this reason the series "EFA Picture“Developed!
This series makes up the almost inexhaustible segment of the professional digital cameras use and deliberately not limited to industrial cameras! Since the area of application of professional cameras can be adapted to new shooting situations much more flexibly, the user can make changes himself:
- The focal plane can from the surface of the circuit board z. B. be moved to the surface of large capacitors or plugs! In this way, only the relevant objects are displayed sharply.
- By exchanging macro lenses, the resolution can be changed from 1000 dpi to 5000 dpi depending on the situation.
- Even the camera can be replaced by the user alone, e.g. B. to benefit from a larger sensor (36 MPixel instead of 24 MPixel)!
However, if the components are getting smaller and the circuit boards are becoming more and more compact, then even the best camera can no longer photograph a circuit board in a single shot. It will then always be necessary to take several individual shots. The real challenge then is to put these single images together into a single microscopic overall image!
The EFA Stitch application was developed for this! EFA Stitch uses that Stitching methodto count all the individual pictures together to form a total picture. The algorithms take into account different exposure situations as well as perspective uncertainties.
The result is a microscopic overall picture, in which it is no longer recognizable that this was the result of a large number of individual pictures!