The Design and Implementation of an Embedded Real-Time Automated IC Marking Inspection System

This paper presents the system and algorithm designs of a real-time automated integrated circuit (IC) marking inspection system based on the embedded platform. Specifically, the system-level design and the integration of hardware and software components are illustrated in this paper. Furthermore, in order to enhance the accuracy of IC inspection, this paper presents a novel algorithm which integrates the classic template matching approach with an efficient angle estimation method, so that the rotation and location of the IC chip can be identified precisely. Formal outline of the proposed algorithm is given in this paper. Moreover, aiming at reducing the computation time, the algorithmic optimizations based on the multi-core embedded processor and the single instruction, multiple data architecture are presented. The experiment results show that, compared to the conventional IC marking inspection algorithm, the proposed system and algorithm greatly improve the efficiency and accuracy of image processing on the embedded system. In particular, when the size of the target image is 640 × 480 pixels and size of the template image is 80 × 100, the average inspection time is 31 ms, which is an approximately 20× improvement from the conventional inspection scheme.