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Automated optical inspection apparatus
| Details |
Inventors: Garakani, Arman; Michael, David J.; Koljonen, Juha;
Assignee: Cognex Corporation (Natick, MA)
Primary Examiner: Britton; Howard W.
Assistant Examiner:
Attorney, Agent or Firm: Stretch; Maureen
This invention provides a method and apparatus for automatically locating the bond of a wire to a lead frame and semiconductor chip or similar device as an in-process operation to facilitate in-process inspection. The apparatus includes a wire bonding machine, or similar apparatus, having a movable platform such as an X-Y table for holding semiconductor chips situated in lead frames; a video camera or other optical sensing or imaging device for generating images, which camera is typically positioned over the target chip and lead frame to be bonded; illumination means for illuminating the chip in a lead frame; an image processor capable of summing said absolute difference values, whereby each sum is stored as a difference metric, and digitizing and analyzing the optically sensed images; a bonding mechanism; and a host controller connected to the bonding mechanism, the movable platform, the camera and the image processor. The apparatus generates and stores a pre-bond digital image of the semiconductor chip in the lead frame before bonding has occurred; connects one or more wires between the chip and lead frame by any of a number of means such as ultrasonic bonding, heat bonding, conductive glue bonding or other means; generates and stores a post-bond digital image of the now-bonded chip in its lead frame; registers the pre-bond and post-bond stored digital images using nearest neighbor interpolation so that analysis can be done; and permits inspection of the results of the wire bonds according to appropriate criteria. |
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DETAILED DESCRIPTION This invention provides a method and apparatus for automatically locating the bond of a wire to a lead frame and semiconductor chip or similar device on one machine as an in-process operation, in order to facilitate in-process inspection.
The apparatus includes a wire bonding machine, or similar apparatus, having a movable platform such as an X-Y table for holding semiconductor chips situated in lead frames; a video camera or other optical sensing imaging device for generating images, which camera is typically positioned over the target chip and lead frame to be bonded; illumination means for illuminating the chip in a lead frame; an image processor capable of digitizing and analyzing the video images; a bonding mechanism; and a host controller connected to the bonding mechanism, the movable platform, the camera and the image processor.
The apparatus generates and stores a pre-bond digital image of the semiconductor chip in the lead frame before bonding has occurred; connects one or more wires between the chip and lead frame by any of a number of means such as ultrasonic bonding, heat bonding, conductive glue bonding or other means; generates and stores a post-bond digital image of the now-bonded chip in its lead frame; registers the pre-bond and post-bond stored digital images so that analysis can be done; and permits inspection of the results of the wire bonds according to appropriate criteria.
In one embodiment of the invention, registering the pre-bond and post-bond images includes creating subsets of the post-bond digital images as windows for searching in order to register the images.
For example, an optical image sensed by the video camera or other optical sensing device, can be digitized by the image processor and stored in a digital memory as a series of pixels (each pixel being represented by a byte) in a two-dimensional array, having x and y coordinates.
A subset, xi, yi of this image which is smaller than the total pre-bond image size, can be generated to be a registration target window
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