Advantech provides high performance GigE Vision solutions for versatile machine vision applications.

Machine vision is used in all kinds of manufacturing, from food & beverages, pharmaceuticals, automotive, semiconductors, to general manufacturing. Human inspection is too slow and unreliable for today’s demanding manufacturing processes, so replacing human inspection with machine vision can go a long way to automating factory operations. Major applications are quality assurance, production automation, and identification.

The scope of the factory will change dramatically, not only in its ability to produce, but the ability to produce with the most flexibility and efficiency. Machine vision plays an important role in achieving 100% quality control in manufacturing, reducing costs, increasing flexibility, and ensuring high levels of customer satisfaction.

A move from analog to digital is necessary, and GigE Vision has become the most used interface in this market. Advantech provides high performance GigE Vision solutions, an open PC-based architecture that includes industrial cameras, computing platforms, and frame grabbers for the traceability, alignment, identification and inspection to fulfill all the requirements for versatile machine vision applications.

Application Stories

Backend semiconductor packaging inspection machines

The semiconductor industry has some of the most demanding applications, requiring a combination of extreme accuracy and precision combined with high throughput. Fast progress towards greater densities and finer dimensions are pushing the limits of optical vision systems for product packaging machines. Advantech offers an intelligent GigE Vision frame grabber, DSP-based multi-axis motion control card, and compact modularised system for direct integration in space limited machines to accomplish high-precision, high productivity IC packaging inspection. The solution uses Advantech’s PCIE-1174, a 4-port PCI Express Intelligent GigE Vision Frame Grabber industrial grade computer. PCIE-1174 includes a dedicated FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chip to reconstruct images before transmitting them in real time to the host PC via DMA (Direct MemoryAccess). This frees up the host PC’s processor and ensures there are no frame or packet losses during image acquisition.

Improving fabric quality in textile industry

Textile manufacturing is a very complex process. Weaving is the most basic process which involves interlacing a set of vertical threads (called the warp) with a set of horizontal threads (called the weft). This new optical web inspection system could detect warp and weft thread breaks in less than one second. Advantech provided UNO-3283G, an Intel i7 Fanless Automation Computer with 2 x GbE, 2 x mPCIe, HDMI, and DVI-I. We also provided PCIE-1172, a two-channel intelligent GigE Vision frame grabber which included a dedicated FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) to reconstruct images before transmitting them in real time to the host PC via DMA (Direct Memory Access). To further aid installation and maintenance, the series included PoE (Power over Ethernet) and the Ad Hoc protocol which, like DHCP, doesn’t require a specific IP address and enables System Integrators (SI) to simply plug their cameras in and start recording.

Implementing product traceability in food & beverages

As the market demand for food safety increases, traceability is getting more attention, as well as product packaging. One of the world’s leading providers of beverage containers wanted to identify the bar codes, characters, and numbers on the ink-jet printing labels at a 7 unit per second run rate. Advantech provided multiple cameras linked to a PC-based automated optical identification system that could identify the bar code, data code, and characters on the beverage container. The system consisted of: AIIS-1240, a 4-ch PoE compact vision system with Intel® Core™ i7 CPU; Inspector Express, a graphical user interface machine vision application software specifically designed to simplify the design and deployment of automated inspection on the factory floor; and QCAM-GM0640-120CE, 0.3 Megapixel industrial camera with the PoE (Power over Ethernet) to simplify installation and maintenance.

Vision system and robotics ensure finished product quality in automotive industry

In the automotive industry, quality control is an extremely important issue. Most of the time, there are engineers to verify vehicle interiors and exteriors, including dashboards, doors, seats, engines, and paint finishes. In one of the largest global automotive groups, there are over 100 items in the finished product checklist and this client was looking for a quality checking system that could perform automatic inspection. To automate quality checks on different parts in different vehicles, a flexible and extensible system had to be created.

System integrators designed an AOI (Automated Optical Inspection) system with multiple cameras and robots for high flexibility and efficiency. For this project, Advantech offered PCIE-1674E, a four channel GigE Vision frame grabber and QCAM-GM2500-014CE, a 5.0 Megapixel industrial camera including PoE (Power over Ethernet) function to simplify installation and maintenance. Besides these, there were other products to help provide the client with their desired functionality: UNO-3283G, which is an Intel i7 Fanless Automation Computer with 2 x GbE, 2 x mPCIe, HDMI, DVI-I; and PC- 1756, a 64-ch Isolated Digital I/O PCI Card.

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