ITEC produces pick-and-place machines used in semiconductor manufacturing. It specializes in high volume and high speed solutions that can handle extremely small dies of tens of micrometers up to medium sized dies of several millimeters.

All machines pick dies from a wafer, and transfer them onto a substrate with electrical leads. During transfer several inspections are done for quality (scratches, chipping, contamination of the die) as well as process control (alignment, rotation, missing die).

Currently, a frame-based camera is used to determine the die size and position (quality inspection is also optional). This requires a motion stop to avoid blurry pictures, which limits the machine speed to ~10 dies/second.

The next generation pick-and-place machines will be designed at much higher speeds (>100 dies/second). This requires vision inspections without a motion stop. This is being tested at ITEC using an event-based camera. Together with IMEC we are defining and testing the envisioned analysis strategy, which looks quite promising. Next step will be to implement this low-latency edge computing on the Rebecca chip using neuromorphic AI accelerators.

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