HawkEye: a new breed of automatic print verification

Citation

(2004), "HawkEye: a new breed of automatic print verification", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 16 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2004.21916aad.019

HawkEye: a new breed of automatic print verification

HawkEye: a new breed of automatic print verification

Keywords: Printing, DEK, Surface mount technology

HawkEye is a new automatic print verification technology from DEK that operates at the line beat rate. HawkEye assesses 100 per cent of printed boards and gives a rapid go/no-go indication for each. Faulty boards can now be automatically isolated in real time.

Explaining that many manufacturers still rely on error-prone manual inspection to identify unacceptable boards, Martin Symons Manager of DEK’s Vision Engineering Team introduced HawkEye. “From an original concept developed by our Vision Technical Specialist David Gaukroger which broke down the inspection proposition to the few bare facts that define whether a board is fit to be passed on to the next process. As a result, HawkEye was developed by our dedicated expert team of Vision Engineers and provides a simple go/no-go indication just like a human operator. But HawkEye is more repeatable, and verifies 100 per cent of boards at line beat rate.”

The new system is intended to complement DEK 2Di, a two-dimensional inspection system that provides a quantitative assessment of print quality and also inspects the stencil. Indeed, HawkEye can be used alongside a 2D system installed on a single machine. But the HawkEye verification routine rapidly scans the board as a series of stripes, and collects a tightly defined set of monochrome image data. Comparing these results with user-defined limits of acceptability, HawkEye quickly indicates whether the board is fit to pass through component placement or other downstream processing. The user can also program HawkEye to inspect only certain areas of the board, for example where print deposit density may be particularly high. This allows the user to adjust the total verification cycle time if necessary, and to derive maximum value from the system within the line beat rate.

The new HawkEye print verification system will be available as an option on all new DEK automatic machines, and as a machine performance upgrade (MPU) for existing platforms in the field, subject to specification.