CR Technology Profiting as Automated Inspectors

All those little components that make our cell phones, pagers, laptop computers and other electronic necessities work keep getting smaller and more complex.

So who inspects them to make sure that the 200 little parts soldered onto a spot the size of a pinhead are what and where they should be?

Increasingly, it isn’t someone crouched over a giant magnifying glass--it isn’t a someone at all. The electronic revolution has spawned automated inspection systems.

One of the players in this $500 million-and-growing industry is CR Technology Inc. in Laguna Niguel. The 15-year-old company started developing automated visual inspection and X-ray inspection equipment at a time when the consumer electronics market was still in its infancy. CR Technology has grown with its customers--usually small contract manufacturers that turn out components for giants such as Rockwell International Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc.

CR designs and assembles complex inspection systems that are controlled by the company’s own proprietary software. The systems, which can cost up to $150,000, use high-resolution cameras and X-ray cameras to scan the nearly microscopic components and verify with tremendous accuracy the placement of individual parts and the integrity of connections and soldered joints.

While the camera systems work wonders, they are not all that complex. The magic is in the software, which enables a CR inspection system to scan and memorize the correct size and placement of the thousands of parts on a complex circuit board in about 30 minutes. The board maker can then run a steady stream of completed boards through the scanning system, which will pick out and reject anything that doesn’t match the “picture” in its memory.

CR’s systems are geared to manufacturers who change products frequently and could not afford the giant $500,000 “dedicated” automated systems designed to inspect a single part or product over a long period of time.

“Automated inspection is growing rapidly because components are getting smaller, product life spans are getting shorter and consumers are demanding lower prices,” said Richard Amtower, CR’s president and chief executive. Automated inspection systems speed up production time and help manufacturers keep a lid on payroll expenses.

He said he expects the automated inspection market to be worth several billion dollars a year by 2002. CR expects to profit from that growth. Amtower says the company, with about $8 million in sales and 36 employees this year, could hit $15 million in sales and add up to 20 more people to its manufacturing and software design staffs next year.