Viscom Upgrades AOI Systems at Marquardt GmbH Plant

Marquardt GmbH relies on Viscom’s AOI and AXI systems for electronics manufacturing. In order to further increase the efficiency of these inspection systems, the older systems have been upgraded with 8M technology, resulting in significant cycle time advantages.

Since 2004, Viscom’s S6055 and S6056 AOI systems, and X7056 AXI systems have been used in Marquardt’s electronics manufacturing facilities. The company’s assembly inspection is fully automatic - with both optical and X-ray inspection systems. This way, even demanding solder joints can be reliably checked.

Because of the successive increase in the number of AOI systems, the individual machines were equipped with different inspection camera technologies. In order to standardize the equipment, the service business division at Viscom has undertaken a complete upgrade at the Marquardt GmbH manufacturing plant. Henning Obloch, Service Manager at Viscom, states, “Again and again we see the advantages that upgrading to the latest camera technology provides for our customers. In addition to optimized performance of the individual AOIs, standardization of our manufacturing plant also brings other synergies. Additionally, the upgrade offers better test coverage.”

To conduct the upgrade, the hardware first was brought up-to-date. To accomplish this, the old camera modules were replaced with the 8M sensor heads on all systems and the corresponding interface modules and cabling were brought to the required technological level. The system computers also were replaced with state-of-the-art models, installed with the newest software release. This provided numerous new functions as well as higher performance potential.

Holger Gerst, responsible for the AOI/AXI inspection systems at Marquardt, commented, “After the upgrade, we had cycle time improvements up to 49.8 percent with certain programs. As an average over all the programs, we were able to measure a 33 percent improvement in cycle time. Today, we can say that all of our expectations have been satisfied. We now have converted three of our five locations to the 8M camera technology and are using the cycle time gains to optimize defect detection on SOT components. All in all, it is very important for us to know our worldwide production is optimally equipped, and the uniformly high standards of the AOI and AXI systems contribute to this goal.”