PC monitör üretimi Omron görüntü sistemine güvenmektedir

Samsung, PC monitörü üretim hattında görüntü kartlarının denetimini otomasyona bağlamak istemiş, bu işlem için de hassas, esnek ve düşük maliyetli görüntü denetim sistemine sahip olan Omron’u seçmiştir.

One of the worlds biggest electronics companies, Samsung is a leading manufacturer in all of its product areas, and top three in many, with its electronic goods including microwaves, video recorders, cameras and televisions.

Making manual inspection obsolete An important product area for Samsung is PC monitors, with the company offering products under its own name, as well as producing monitors for some of the world's foremost computer companies. Samsung's UK factories began manufacturing computer monitors two years ago, and demand has steadily increased to a level where the company is producing more than 5,000 units a day. Production is spread across two factories, with one assembling the PCBs and the other putting the finished monitors together.

Test engineer Ian Slack explains that board inspection was identified as a prime candidate for automation: "Since we operate a just-in-time manufacturing regime, the decision was taken early that we should produce our own PCBs rather than relying on delivering from HQ. We implemented a full production line to manufacture these boards - a video board sub-assembly and main board - but increased demand led us to look at automation of areas of production. Automation of the inspection process promised the greatest benefits, in terms of raising quality and increasing productivity."

Modular production The automated inspection aspect of the line was developed as a standalone module for easy insertion into the video board production line, to provide the essential checking before the functional test. In operation, completed boards are fed into a stacker, which provides a buffer at the front end of the inspection system. Each board is then indexed in turn under the camera. With a complete board consisting of four identical sub-assemblies on a frame, the F150 camera performs four successive and identical checks on the board. Boards that pass are then indexed on to the functional check, and from there on to an output stacker ready for dispatch to the factory which assembles the monitors. A complete board is checked in just 33 seconds, which includes the loading and unloading operations. Omron sensors are used throughout to provide positioning information to control the indexing of the boards and camera. "The combination of pattern matching and greyscale inspection has proved very successful," says Slack. "Greyscale inspection is very fast, and is ideal for spotting errors such as diodes being inserted the wrong way round. Pattern matching provides an excellent means of quickly finding and checking given shapes in certain areas of the board. "Another advantage of the F150 is that it is very tolerant of lighting conditions," he continues. "We found we only needed to use a single lamp above the camera to achieve reliable operation, and we didn't need to provide any covering to screen out ambient light." Commenting on the effectiveness of the inspection system, Slack says: "The F150 has proved so successful at picking up faults on the video boards that the functional test bed has become effectively redundant."

The automated inspection system has seen production ramped up to a level where Samsung expects to produce in excess of 1.5 million monitors this year. Plans are afoot to apply the same vision inspection system to the production of the main boards to help meet next year's production target of some 2.2 million monitors.