Manufacturing / Electronics
Siemens: Preparing PCB optical inspection with a digital twin and synthetic images
- Company
- Siemens
- Country
- Germany
- Adoption stage
- Pilot
- Source published
- Date basis
- The date the source was published. It can differ from the date adoption started.
- How the source was checked
- Read the full source text
The work problem
When introducing a new electronics model or variant, optical inspection programs traditionally could only be prepared and trained after a physical prototype board became available. In high-mix production with frequent process changes, waiting for physical samples and manually preparing inspection burdened production changeovers.
Technology and data
Siemens uses its Electronics Factory Erlangen in Germany as the demonstration site. Process Preparation X validates and normalizes PCB designs, bills of materials and component information from Teamcenter into a digital twin of the assembled board. NVIDIA Cosmos generates synthetic images of a reference board and defective boards to calibrate inspection equipment before physical production. For production, the described workflow includes AI-supported secondary inspection to analyze whether a potential defect flagged by optical inspection is a real defect or a false call.
Results
Siemens said it was demonstrating this inspection preparation workflow using a real factory production environment and domain expertise. The aim is to reduce dependence on physical boards and manual work. The announced reductions of up to 85% in manual AOI programming effort and 40% in false calls, and more than 5% improvement in first-pass yield, are project targets, not achieved measurements.
Limits and open questions
Achieved processing time, false-call rates and yield figures from the demonstration were not disclosed. Final approval authority for inspection decisions and the full scope of commercial deployment were not established.
Sources
Compiled from public sources. These are not results from ATF Works customers.