Product category:
Electronics Manufacturing Materials and Consumables
News Release from: Agilent Technologies Europe | Subject: Medalist x6000
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 25 April 2007
X-ray system boasts twice the throughput
3D X-ray inspection system reduces customers' manufacturing conversion costs without compromising defect-detection capability.
Agilent Technologies is claiming a breakthrough for inline 3D X-ray inspection systems that detect printed circuit board assembly (PCBA) solder and manufacturing assembly defects The Agilent Medalist x6000 AXI reduces customers' manufacturing conversion costs without compromising defect-detection capability
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 23 Apr 2008 at 8.00am (UK)
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Zollner is one of the early adopters of the new Medallist x6000 automated X-ray inspection system in Europe.
X-ray inspection speeds board quality control
The Agilent x6000 finds defects in solder joints, resulting in higher end product quality and lower warranty repair and scrap costs.
It accomplishes this by more than doubling the throughput of market-leading 3D solutions while using full 3D capability to find defects.
"The de facto standard for 3D X-ray inspection has been the Agilent Medalist 5DX system, with more than 800 systems installed", said Kent Dinkel, Agilent's AXI marketing manager.
"The next-generation Medalist x6000 leverages that X-ray expertise to provide the uncompromised 3D throughput and fault detection necessary for today's complex PCBAs".
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The increased throughput of the Medalist x6000 has two clear benefits.
First, it directly reduces the number of systems required to meet manufacturing volumes by cutting in half the required capital expenditures.
Secondly, it enables complete 3D inspection of the entire PCBA at in-line speeds for the highest defect detection possible.
In the past, high-throughput 2D solutions have been used in limited applications where the PCBAs under test are predominately single-sided.
However, today's and future double-sided PCBAs require uncompromised 3D inspection so that users can discriminate between the top and bottom sides of boards where there is a high-density of solder joints.
Typical communication and computation products can have 35% overlap or more between the solder joints, which severely compromises the test coverage effectiveness of inline 2D solutions for these products.
Alternative systems attempt to address this coverage gap by adding slow 3D inspection to a 2D machine.
While this might appear to be a good solution, overall throughput is often compromised.
Only the Agilent Medalist x6000 delivers high-throughput 3D coverage that can be used to inspect the entire board.
In addition to unsurpassed 3D throughput, the Medalist x6000 can also reduce implementation barriers caused by high employee turnover in outsourced regions.
This turnover rate can be a significant hindrance to developing high-quality applications since effective programming knowledge-transfer is not consistent.
The Medalist x6000 helps to address this problem by providing a new development environment that incorporates several automatic test development features that help new users to develop high-quality high-coverage programs in half the time previously required.
The Agilent Medalist x6000 will start shipping in May 2007.
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