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The inventor of a significant Teradyne inspection technology - Dr Pamela Lipson and her company Imagen - have been recognised as one of an elite group of 40 "Technology pioneers for 2003" by the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland.
Lipson and Imagen were recognised for the development of innovative technologies for recognition and analysis of complex visual and image-based information.
Teradyne has licensed this innovative technology and incorporated it as the fundamental image-analysis software technology in the Optima 7200 OPT machine vision system, which will be formally introduced at the APEX trade show, a major electronics-manufacturing industry event, in Anaheim, California on 31st March 2003.
The leading-edge technology was initially developed by Dr Lipson and her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Lab, and was refined by her company Imagen.
In 1997, the technology attracted the interest of Teradyne, and was developed for application in the field of printed circuit board inspection.
It is now the basis of Teradyne's newest generation of Optima machine vision systems.
Several of the new Optima 7200 OPT systems, jointly developed by an integrated team of Imagen and Teradyne engineers, are already in use by electronics manufacturers in Asia and North America.
"Pam's recognition by the World Economic Forum is quite an honour", said John Casey, President of Teradyne's Assembly Test Division.
"We are very happy to see her recognised for her substantial achievements in developing this significant technology, and are excited to have been able to leverage it to introduce a major advancement in the science of PCB vision inspection".
The Imagen technology delivers intelligent image analysis and object recognition capability to 'test' visual objects collected in a composite image of a manufactured circuit board.
The images are analysed for defects and for manufacturing process trends that indicate future defects.
The recognition technology allows the system to test the specific objects in the PCB appearance without lengthy programming or training efforts.
Dr Lipson's technology also delivers built-in tolerance to normal object appearance variation (for instance, from supplier changes), to accelerate inspection times.
"Pam and her team developed an innovative approach to visual recognition that has revolutionised the domain of industrial machine vision", noted Eric Grimson, Bernard Gordon Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems at MIT.
"Exhibiting a tolerance to environmental effects that challenge that of a human, while recognising minute nuances in part positioning and trends across time, these methods provide a level of remarkably robust performance at incredible speeds.
The potential for applying these methods in domains beyond industrial machine vision is enormous".
Feedback from early users of the Optima 7200 OPT system has been very positive.
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