Automated vision system for IC lead inspection

An automated vision system for the inspection of Small Outline Package (SOP) and Dual In-Line Package (DIP) IC lead flaws is presented. This system consists of a special lighting and image acquisition system, a series of processing techniques to measure the lead coplanarity and to inspect the skewed lead frame. In this research, a new algorithm for determining the reference plane of an IC and measuring the coplanarity was developed, and compared with a traditional algorithm. Experimental results show that the proposed image acquisition system is helpful for IC lead image acquisition and the proposed lead inspection system can effectively detect skewed lead ICs and faulty coplanarity ICs. In addition, the proposed algorithm for finding the reference plane results in better performance in processing speed and detection accuracy than the traditional algorithm.