February 23, 1999, Montreal, Canada - Matrox Imaging, a division of the Matrox Corporate Group and supplier of PC-based vision hardware and software components to OEMs and system integrators, today announced that Speedline Technologies uses the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) and Matrox Meteor-II series frame grabbers as vision subsystems. CAMALOT XYFLEX™ automated liquid dispensing system and CAMALOT MATRIXX™ sphere placement system for ball grid array production each employs a Matrox subsystem for vision alignment and/or inspection. Speedline Technologies designs and builds assembly equipment for the printed circuit board, semiconductor, hybrid, automotive, industrial and medical industries.

"When it came time to design our next-generation liquid dispenser, we evaluated imaging component suppliers and after careful consideration, decided to go with Matrox as a supplier of the vision subsystem components for our CAMALOT XYFLEX machine," said Bob MacMillan, Vice President of Engineering at Speedline CAMALOT. "The vision alignment subsystem we developed for our machine using the Matrox software and frame grabber achieved the reliability, repeatability, accuracy and performance we needed - all at the price our customers demanded."

CAMALOT XYFLEX is capable of dispensing up to 140,000 dots of adhesive or solder paste per hour, depending on application. This performance is three to four times faster than any other liquid dispenser. Introduced just one year ago, CAMALOT XYFLEX is now in full production at the company's Haverhill, Massachusetts product and technology center and units are being shipped to customers worldwide.

The award-winning Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) software development toolkit offers OEMs like Speedline CAMALOT an extensive set of high-level functions for image acquisition, processing, analysis and display. The software is available as traditional 'C' libraries or ActiveX (OCX) controls. Originally introduced in 1994 and with thousands of users to date, the field-proven MIL toolkit was the first of its kind to offer the 32-bit support and optimizations for Intel MMX technology that enable developers to fully exploit the processing power of today's PCs. Improvements and additions continue to offer developers facing increased time-to-market pressures the tools they need to quickly build high-performance machine vision and imaging systems.

The Matrox Meteor-II frame grabber used in CAMALOT XYFLEX™ dispensing machines is one PCI board in a series that provides OEMs and system integrators with a cost-effective way to accurately digitize images. Matrox Meteor-II boards are available in several versions to interface to a variety of analog, digital, monochrome and color cameras and video devices.

"By using the pattern matching module, filtering functions and other high-level routines found in the MIL toolkit, we were able to quickly develop algorithms for the vision alignment functionality of our CAMALOT XYFLEX machine," said Jorge Camargo, software engineering manager at Speedline CAMALOT, "and the standard Matrox Meteor-II frame grabber provided us with a low-cost way of digitizing images and transferring them in real time to the PC for processing. Using Matrox's hardware, software and the powerful PCs available today, we were able to forego the use of more expensive dedicated image processing hardware for our application."

Since the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) is a common API across current and future Matrox Imaging frame grabbers and vision processors, the vision algorithms that developers create with it can be reused for other projects where appropriate.

For example, the new CAMALOT MATRIXX™, an automated machine that accurately places solder spheres onto ball grid array (BGA) components using positive placement and 100% vision inspection, uses the Matrox Imaging Library (MIL) with Matrox Meteor-II/Digital frame grabber boards. The new CAMALOT BENCHMARK™ for MATRIXX software is configured to use the Matrox software and boards to enable vision alignment and inspection of the placed BGA spheres.

NOTE: CAMALOT XYFLEX, CAMALOT MATRIXX, CAMALOT BENCHMARK are all trademarks of Speedline Technologies, Inc.

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