This paper provides a general overview of immediate and long-term aims of the printed circuit board inspection project of The Robotics Institute. Its purpose is to highlight some of the significant issues specific to printed circuit board inspection and to provide a discussion of our basic thesis that machine inspection should be coupled with machine diagnosis of the causes of observed printed ...

We review recent progress in the Terabus program, a chip-to-chip interconnect over optical waveguides on a printed circuit board. While such interconnects need to overcome packaging challenges, they promise datarate-scalability and performance advantages over electrical interconnects.

The primary purpose of printed circuit board (PCB) reverse engineering is to determine electronic system or subsystem functionality by analyzing how components are interconnected. We performed a series of experiments using both inexpensive home-based solutions and state-of-the-art technologies with a goal of removing exterior coatings and accessing individual PCB layers. This paper presents our...

A modeling method for representing belt object deformation is proposed. Deformation of belt objects such as film circuit boards or flexible circuit boards must be estimated for automatic manipulation and assembly. In this paper, we assume that deformation of an inextensible belt object can be described by the shape of its central axis in a longitudinal direction called “the spine line” and line...

An innovative technology for the mass production of stretchable printed circuit boards (SCBs) will be presented in this paper. This technology makes it possible for the first time to really integrate fine pitch, high performance electronic circuits easily into textiles and so may be the building block for a totally new generation of wearable electronic systems. An overview of the technology wil...

This tutorial paper reviews the basic mechanisms by which signal voltages and currents on a printed circuit board produce unintentional radiated emissions.