Integrating Visual Inspection Capabilties into an Automatic Test Equipment Software Environment

This paper will discuss the design and development of a visual inspection system and its integration into a proprietary Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) software environment. The initial concept of our inspection system is discussed, including a brief outline of why we chose to investigate a vision system, and our development plan. Following the initial purpose and plan, we will talk about the development of the system. This portion of the paper will include a brief description of the commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware and software used in the system, followed by an examination of the initial hardware setup and the development of the visual inspection process. After the inspection system has been examined, its integration into a proprietary ATE software environment is reviewed. Special emphasis will be placed on describing the challenge of adding a robust visual inspection capability to an ATE software environment requiring the flexibility to support multiple types of visual inspections using a common architecture. Finally we will review the lessons learned from this development project and briefly explore other potential applications of an integrated visual inspection system. These include: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and circuit board inspection.