Real-time Analysis of an IC Wire-bonding Inspection System

Though the need to consider all aspects of real-time in the development of a system is not new to control engineers, they are relatively new to the machine vision specialists, especially as they tend to come from various different backgrounds. In practice most vision experts tend to “tweak” their systems to match the speed of the application environment. They rarely use any formal or indeed informal methods to understand, design and analyse the real-time behavior of their systems. This paper, however, suggests that this trend needs to be reversed, and that correct timing of an operation is as important as correct logical operation. The paper starts by justifying the need to analyse the dynamic behavior of machine-vision systems. The paper then briefly reviews some of the basic concepts of real-time systems, and explores a tool available for the specification and analysis of real-time systems. Finally, the paper discusses the analysis of the real-time behavior of a machine vision system developed for the inspection of the bonding process occurring in IC fabrication.