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www.us-tech.com
February, 2013
You Only Think You Don’t Need X-Ray Imaging
By Glen Thomas, Sales, X-Ray Product Manager, Scienscope, Chino, CA
components.” This is a common mis- conception in electronics manufac- turing circles, and there are a couple of reasons for this. But before we get into that, we need to back up a little and look at the x-ray imaging indus- try in general. X-Ray has been a valuable asset to manufacturing and industries like oil and gas generation for decades. But during the mid 1990s, the role of x-ray imaging in manufacturing was redefined by this new thing called BGA placement. Suddenly, x-ray became the answer for these new things called BGAs. X-
H
X-ray systems have been inspecting turbines and other critical products for many years, often requir- ing that the test engineer become very inventive in his/her approach to testing.
ray imaging was all the rage in the electronics industry and x-ray inspection system manufacturers did not miss the opportunity get a piece of this market. Keep in mind that some forward-looking electronics manufacturers and OEMs had used x-ray for years as an R&D and
ow often have we heard the refrain: “We don’t need x-ray imaging; we don’t place BGA
solve his process problem. On more than one occasion the process engi- neer would grab his first-run boards and make the journey to a local vet- erinarian’s office for a few x-ray films of his product. During the early to mid 1990s x-ray system manufactur- ers happened upon this new thing called BGA placement. Sentiment in the industry was “What? We can build one platform and sell it repeat- edly without any real changes,” and so the BGA inspection industry was born. Unfortunately, the old miscon- ception that if you’re not placing BGAs, you don’t need x-ray continues to this day.
Crude Early Instruments Not too long ago affordable x-
X-ray image of over-molded connector and cable.
process validation tool. During that time there were
some great companies that designed and built x-ray systems for a variety of industrial applications; each of these x-ray systems had been one-of- a-kind and solved a specific manufac- turing problem. Because general industrial x-ray imaging in the early years was a one-of-a-kind solution, each x-ray system was designed to solve a problem. To be sure, this
allowed x-ray system manufacturers to solve manufacturing issues, but also increased the overall cost of the imaging system, while generally low- ering such a system’s versatility. Sure x-ray systems that were
designed to inspect turbines could also be used to inspect other items and often were placed into service to do just that, but the process of inspection often required the engi- neer to become quite inventive to
ray consisted of a crudely construct- ed lead-lined box, some variant of an image intensifier with a CCD camera and a very limited standalone image processing box. Advances in x-ray tube technology, x-ray image detec- tors and computers have actually reduced the cost of an x-ray system to the point that even smaller manufac- turers can now afford what was once considered a luxury and only avail- able to larger manufacturers. Today’s affordable x-ray sys-
tems are full-featured x-ray systems that allow an engineer to program the system to inspect a large variety
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