A Novel Inspection Technique for Electronic Components Using Thermography (NITECT)

Unverified or counterfeited electronic components pose a big threat globally because they could lead to malfunction of safety-critical systems and reduced reliability of high-hazard assets. The current inspection techniques are either expensive or slow, which becomes the bottleneck of large volume i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Haochen Liu, Lawrence Tinsley, Wayne Lam, Sri Addepalli, Xiaochen Liu, Andrew Starr, Yifan Zhao
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-09-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/17/5013
Description
Summary:Unverified or counterfeited electronic components pose a big threat globally because they could lead to malfunction of safety-critical systems and reduced reliability of high-hazard assets. The current inspection techniques are either expensive or slow, which becomes the bottleneck of large volume inspection. As a complement of the existing inspection capabilities, a pulsed thermography-based screening technique is proposed in this paper using a digital twin methodology. A FEM-based simulation unit is initially developed to simulate the internal structure of electronic components with deviations of multiple physical properties, informed by X-ray data, along with its thermal behaviour under exposure to instantaneous heat. A dedicated physical inspection unit is then integrated to verify the simulation unit and further improve the simulation by taking account of various uncertainties caused by equipment and samples. Principle component analysis is used for feature extraction, and then a set of machine learning-based classifiers are employed for quantitative classification. Evaluation results of 17 chips from different sources successfully demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed technique.
ISSN:1424-8220