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At the recent HKPCA & IPC APEX South China Fair, I spoke with Gillad Galor, founder and general manager of AOI maker Optima LTD, about the his company's technology, and what's driving product innovation in the AOI space. He also talked about the benefits of in-line AOI systems.
Stephen Las Marias: Gillad, let's start by your telling us about Optima and your responsibilities at the company.
Gillad Galor: I'm the general manager of Optima, and I'm also the founder. We are focusing at the moment only on one product—advanced AOI for PCBs. AOI is our field, and right now we do automatic AOI. When we say automatic AOI, we mean in-line AOI.
Las Marias: What's the advantage and benefit of it?
Galor: In-line AOI is actually an AOI machine attached to the DES line, the develop-etch-strip line. That brings a variety of advantages and, the way we see it, zero disadvantages. First of all, the capacity is very high because the DES line is very fast—about four times higher than traditional common AOIs. Second, it scans both sides simultaneously. The third and most important one, I believe, is it saves manpower. You don't need many people standing next to many machines, loading panels, flipping them and unloading them and waiting for the machine to scan.
Another advantage is you scan the panels once they are fresh, so you don't need to handle all the technologies for reducing false alarms from oxidation and from dust. Other advantages are it saves space and it saves maintenance contracts. It also saves on power.
Las Marias: A few months ago, we did a survey from our readers regarding cycle time reduction. One of the bottlenecks they mentioned in their process is inspection. What can you comment on that, from the perspective of an AOI supplier?
Galor: It's very easy to go to an AOI room and see piles of PCBs waiting for inspection. It's very common. That speaks for itself, so I definitely agree with that. AOI is another station that takes a lot of time. At least we save one station—we save the scanning station. At the moment, we still need a repair station. Once there is a quality issue, we still need to take the board offline and repair it.
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