Comet Yxlon GmbH

Laminography: the advantages of 2D and 3D testing combined.
Computer laminography is sometimes also referred to as "2.5D testing", as it can be classified technologically between 2D X-ray fluoroscopy and 3D computed tomography (CT). Laminography is suitable for the special challenges of testing flat components such as printed circuit boards (PCB), microchips (IC), complete cell phones, tablets, laptops - or even fonts on papyrus. While 2D X-ray inspection provides high resolution but no spatial information, 3D CT provides good spatial information but possibly too little resolution. This is a case for laminography: it adds depth information to the high-resolution 2D images so that defects in a flat object can be reliably detected and spatially localized.

These Comet Yxlon systems offer computer laminography
Cougar EVO
Cheetah EVO
FF85 CT

Electronics: Inspection of printed circuit boards (PCB) with laminography.

Laminography is the ideal technology for quality assurance of solder joints, e.g. on ball grid arrays (BGA), which are soldered to PCBs using the reflow process. Testing the solder joints ensures that the contact surfaces are large enough to conduct electricity or heat in the prescribed manner. It also determines the presence of voids and their size and distribution. When inspecting densely packed double-sided PCBs, systems such as Cheetah EVO and Cougar EVO use laminography to create layered images of the contact area - without the overlay of components on the other side of the PCB obstructing the view as with 2D X-ray images. The final evaluation of the solder joints is supported by the VoidInspect CL software workflow.

Semiconductors: quality control of microchips.

With ICs and wafers, it is not the connections between a circuit board and a chip that need to be inspected, but the connections between different layers within a chip - for example between silicon dies or between silicon dies and a substrate or distribution layer. As advanced packaging integrated circuits consist of multiple layers, a 2D X-ray image is usually insufficient for analysis as it does not provide spatial information and the various internal structures overlap. Systems such as Cheetah EVO and Cougar EVO use laminography to generate high quality images of the interconnect layers.