Data Matrix Code — A reliable optical identification of microelectronic components

In automatic manufacturing and assembling of printed circuit boards (PCB) one needs to reliably identify the microelectronic components. To achieve this, we propose a method for identification of electronic and microelectronic components by marking each component with a Data Matrix Code (DMC). Using this code, the checking system can recognize the position of each component and by decoding, it can extract information about the type and the manufacturing of the microelectronic component. Because of the very small sizes of the components, because of in general critical illumination conditions and because of the low reflexivity of the black plastic packages of the components, the image processing task of finding the code and extracting the information is much more challenging than in the case of standard DMC printed with black ink on white paper. To cope with this situation we propose a new robust method for Data Matrix Code identification.