Masters Abstracts (1992)

HUANG, YU-WEN
(May 1992), Member, Technical Staff, Institute of Microelectronics, Singapore

Email: yuwen@ime.org.sg

A Surface Mount Component Placement Sequence Advisor for Multi-Batch Production

Owing to component miniaturization and high placement accuracy, SMT requires the use of automated placement machines. This is especially true in the multi-batch production environment, since the placement process plays a crucial role in determining the throughput time of a PCB assembly line. With this understanding, the identification of an acceptable component placement sequence is in urgent need in this domain.

To tackle the component placement optimization problem, several approaches have been proposed. However, due to its equipment oriented nature, no universal methodology or algorithm can solve all the problems encountered. Under the circumstances, an expert system approach, a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), with keen heuristic rules could be a possible solution. The proposed knowledge based system was designed in a modular fashion, where each module is developed independently of the other. The programming language used was PROLOG, which can properly represent the domain knowledge through its declarative predicate formats. Two major components in this system are the expert system module and the optimization module. Through its tandem system architecture, the qualitative knowledge based system provides inputs to and requests outputs from the optimization module. Before the solution is released to the user, the output from the optimization module will be evaluated by the expert system.