Abstract
This paper presents the measurement and correction method of PCB alignment errors for PCB screen printer. Electronic equipment is getting smaller and yet must satisfy high performance standard. Therefore, there is a great demand for PCB with high density. However conventional PCB screen printer doesn't have enough accuracy to accommodate the demand for high-resolution circuit pattern and high-density mounting capacity of electronic chips. It is because the alignment errors of PCB occur when it is loaded to the screen printer. Therefore, this study focuses on the development of the system which is able to measure and correct alignment errors with high-accuracy. An automatic optical inspection part measures the PCB alignment errors using machine vision, and the high-accuracy 3-axis stage makes correction for these errors. This system used two CCD cameras to get images of two fiducial marks of PCB. The centers of fiducial marks are obtained by using moment, gradient method. The first method is calculating the centroid by using first moment of blob, and the latter method is calculating the center of the circle whose equation is obtained by curve-fitting the boundaries of fiducial mark. The operating system used to implement the whole set-up is carried in Window 98 (or NT) environment. Finally we implemented this system to PCB screen printer.