Abstract

Since conventional mechanical punching technology for Flexible Printed Circuit Board (FPCB) drilling has restricted via-hole size and depth control for multi-layer circuit boards, CO2 and Ultra Violet (UV) laser drilling technologies have been developed. However, the FPCBs for mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) require smaller via-hole diameters, since the development of thinner and higher circuit density devices is demanded. Currently, UV laser systems are widely used for FPCB drilling of 75–105μm diameter via-holes and inspectors performs quality test manually using microscopes. We developed a high-precision UV laser microfabrication system for next-generation FPCB drilling of 15μm diameter via-holes. The degrees of the precision of the microfabricated via-holes of 15, 35, 50 and 85μm were mean absolute error rate of 4.4, 2.2, 2.3, and 2.2 which was fully satisfied with industrial inspection specification ±10%. The drilling speed of the system of 2800 via-holes per second at stationary state was achieved. In addition, we applied modified Greedy 2-opt algorithm to find out optimal drilling path which reduced the total time of via-hole fabrication. We successfully reduced the production time by 25% compared with the result obtained in the normal Greedy 2-opt algorithm. Moreover, we designed very accurate inspection method using Canny edge detection and geometric pattern matching algorithms and successfully applied it to the Automated Optical Inspection (AOI) module for the inspections of 15μm diameter via-hole which was required for the fabrication of high density FPCB.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call