3D Metrology & Inspection System Generic for Industrial Verticals (ART/402CP)

In recent ten years, high-end 3D metrology and inspection systems and products have been developed and released in the market by top companies of GOM, ZEISS, Keyence, LMI etc from the regions of Germany, American, Canada and Japan. The high-end market segment is monopolized by these companies. There are a lot of market needs, but only less than 10% market needs are met. The reason is that there are still some bottlenecks to barrier wide applications.1) The systems are only capable for the limited verticals and scenarios, and not flexible enough for ever-changing production lines. 2) There are still technical bottlenecks in software. The performances in terms of speed, accuracy and intelligence are not good enough to meet strict industrial requirements of real-time, high-precision, high-repeatability and fully automatic inline 3D metrology and inspection. In the region of China market, the domestic companies still have gap with the top companies, and only focus on 3D hardware development without software capability. Thus, they are not able to provide the whole system product including both hardware and software, cannot compete with the top tiers in high-end market sector. To make technical breakthrough and broaden 3D applications, this project will focus on high-end 3D metrology and inspection system, especially software development. The following key technologies will be developed. 1) A generic software for high-end 3D metrology and inspection scenarios will be built up. High performances in terms of speed, accuracy, intelligence and genericity are ensured by the novel algorithms of 3D geometry extraction, 3D model operation and 3D deep-learning modules. The metrology and inspection scenarios are also implemented, including 3D defect detection, and 3D dimension and tolerance measuring. 2) High-end 3D scanning hardware will be developed to build up high-precision systems to verify the proposed software in various applications including semiconductor and industrial microscope. The high-definition optics are designed for high-precision performance and simultaneously solving the existing technical bottlenecks including diverse surfaces, occlusion and size limitation. This project’s technologies will be firstly applied in high-end microscope vertical. Simultaneously, this project will build a solid foundation of high-end 3D metrology and inspection platform, more verticals will be explored in the following projects, including semiconductor, biomedical and automobile segments.