Highlights

At what the company billed as “the smallest ribbon-cutting ceremony in history,” Carl Zeiss SMT opened its North American headquarters in Peabody, MA, on April 23. The new facility houses engineering, manufacturing, and technical support. Products include scanning-electron microscopes, crossbeam microscopes, and helium-ion microscopes.

Speaking to the invited audience during the ceremony, company president Frank Averdung explained that the Carl Zeiss instruments can measure distances “from stars to atoms.” The ceremony also included a video presentation, “The world’s smallest ribbon cutting,” that showed an image of a blue ribbon from a high-power microscope as a beam cut the ribbon. www.smt.zeiss.com.

YesTech has introduced a B-UV conformal coating inspection system that automates the process of using ultraviolet lighting for determining the quality, consistency, and thickness of conformal coatings on electronic products. The B-UV system can identify delamination, cracks, and bubbles as well as areas of noncoverage.

YesTech reports that system setup can typically be completed in only a few minutes, as the B-UV uses a known-good board to learn the coverage and noncoverage areas. Subsequently, the automated inspection typically takes only a few seconds. Results can be immediately displayed or can be stored for later review. The B-UV reads all common bar codes to support product traceability, and an optional software upgrade enables the system to determine component presence and location. www.yestechinc.com.

The single-mode fiber-coupled Lasiris PureBeam laser from StockerYale employs a thermoelectric cooler to maintain a constant laser diode temperature, improving the stability of both wavelengths and output power, according to the company. The PureBeam laser covers a wavelength range of 375 nm to 830 nm and delivers output power of 1 mW to 60 mW. All models emit diffraction-limited circular beams.

For applications requiring uniform flat-top illumination, the PureBeam laser can be integrated with the company’s Flat-Top2 Generator, a beam-shaping module that converts a Gaussian beam to a flat-top square or rectangular profile. The PureBeam laser is designed for applications such as machine vision, confocal microscopy, and industrial inspection as well as spectroscopy and fluorescence. www.stockeryale.com/lasers.

A high-speed version of SVS-VISTEK’s 16-Mpixel svs16000 industrial CCD camera integrates a Gigabit Ethernet interface to achieve a frame rate of 4 fps at a resolution of 4896x3280 pixels. The svs16000-U is the first member of the SVCam-CP family to offer the GigE interface. The progressive-scan svs16000-U is available in both monochrome and color versions. www.svs-vistek.com.

The Applied Aera2 mask inspection system from Applied Materials uses aerial imaging technology to reveal how the pattern on a mask will appear on a wafer. The company claims that the system detects defects according to their impact on the wafer, and it filters out nonprinting defects.

Applied Materials explains that by emulating the optical system of 193-nm lithography scanners and placing an image sensor in the wafer plane, the Aera2 system inspects the mask under the same optical conditions as when it is exposed in a stepper to provide “what you see is what you print” capability. An optional application uses the imaging data to create uniformity maps of an entire mask. These maps can reveal subtle manufacturing effects to help mask makers fine tune the mask manufacturing process. www.appliedmaterials.com.

Increasing machine-vision resolution to inspect ever smaller circuit features triggers the need for increased frame rates to maintain production throughput. Higher frame rates, in turn, require decreased exposure times. Capturing images of sufficient quality with shorter exposures demands adequate lighting of the objects under inspection.

To help you illuminate your products properly, National Instruments has posted three tutorials to its Web site that cover the topic of lighting in machine-vision systems. The first article in the series, which was written by Daryl Martin of Advanced Illumination, introduces the basic concepts and theories of inspection lighting. It provides information about the types of lighting available and the optimum arrangement of lighting sources.

The other two articles in this series (which actually appeared on the Web site first) explore various lighting techniques and describe how to design an efficient lighting system. zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/6901.