A company in Zhuhai has a unique skill: it can take photos of each grain of pepper and remove any imperfections!

By/Photo Yangcheng Evening News reporter Wu Guosong

The process of conducting a physical examination on a person is already familiar to everyone, but how should a physical examination be conducted on "millimeter-level" components? Taking a smartphone as an example, it contains more than a thousand internal components. If a component has a defect, the quality of the phone cannot be guaranteed. In computers and new energy vehicles, the number of such components is even greater.

Rapidly detecting a large number of "invisible to the naked eye" components has always been a pain point in the industry. However, in Zhuhai, there is a company that has developed a "unique skill", achieving a comprehensive "physical examination" of "millimeter-level" components from various angles, with a detection volume of 8,500 per minute. The company's leader told the Yangcheng Evening News reporter that in the past, these technologies were mainly mastered by Japanese and South Korean companies, but now their detection level has caught up with them.

Domestic testing previously relied on foreign countries

Zhuhai Audewei Technology Co., Ltd., established in 2015, is a high-tech enterprise focusing on high-speed optical sorting equipment. General Manager Yu Chaofan introduced that if rice is food for people, then components are the "food" for electrical equipment. However, the components are very small, generally at the millimeter level, and it is difficult to see them with the naked eye, let alone manually screening out unqualified products.

“These components are very small, but if they are damaged, the phone will be scrapped, so what we need to do is to conduct a comprehensive inspection before these components enter the circuit board to determine whether there are any quality problems.” But it is not easy to test such tiny components. Yu Chaofan explained that using manual inspection is not realistic. First, manual inspection is extremely slow and can only be done through spot checks; second, manual inspection does not have uniform standards and is easily affected by external factors, resulting in large detection loopholes.

To solve this problem, the industry began to use equipment to detect tiny components one by one. However, for a long time, these technologies and equipment were held by Japanese and South Korean companies, and domestic product testing relied on foreign countries. Yu Chaofan told the Yangcheng Evening News reporter that the development of components and breakthroughs in their detection technology are closely related to the development of related industries. He gave an example: several years ago, foreign Mobile Brands occupied the vast majority of the market share, giving rise to the foreign component detection industry. However, in recent years, the rise of domestic Mobile Brands has naturally increased the demand for components, and domestic component detection has put forward higher requirements. “We constantly look for pain points in this industry, and through continuous technological research, we have made certain achievements in the development of high-speed optical sorting equipment.”

Nearly 10,000 pieces detected per minute

Zeng Sheng, technical director of Zhuhai Audewei Technology Co., Ltd., told reporters that their initial equipment could detect between 2,000 and 3,000 pieces per minute. For the huge demand for components, this detection speed could not truly meet market demand. Through continuous efforts, they have now obtained patents in special light sources, six-sided detection equipment, and magnetic ring detection equipment, and have developed various equipment such as capacitance and inductance appearance inspection and sorting, and the detection speed has exceeded 8,500 per minute.

“Without such a high speed of detection, it is impossible to achieve full inspection.” Zeng Sheng said that their equipment performs defect detection, which is currently the most difficult to achieve in the detection field. To put it simply, it is like giving a millimeter-level component a "physical examination", not only to find surface defects but also to determine whether the inside is "healthy". “At first, we used traditional algorithms, and now we are introducing AI algorithms to perform detection through artificial intelligence. We input the rich experience of our detection engineers into the computer and let the computer continuously learn automatically.”

Precise detection of these components requires overcoming many obstacles: material alignment, high-definition photography, rapid analysis, and precise classification. In the workshop, technicians are pouring a bag of component raw materials into a hopper like sand grains, and the volume of these components is 0.4 * 0.2 * 0.2 mm. “The white line you see now is actually a line of components.” On the detection equipment, reporters saw that the alignment mechanism quickly “tamed” the components one by one, with a response speed of milliseconds. There are six workstations on the glass plate of the equipment, each workstation equipped with a magnifying glass for optical imaging, allowing a clear view of each component.

Zeng Sheng explained that when the components line up through each workstation, optical equipment can clearly see the appearance of each component and take photos. Then, the equipment will automatically analyze whether the components have defects. For example, whether the resistor has a broken mark, missing tin on the electrode, whether the capacitor has chipping, or cracked corners, etc. After the components "rotate" on the equipment, a high-speed electromagnetic valve will precisely classify them.

Zeng Sheng introduced that since the equipment needs to complete alignment, photography, analysis, and classification, the computing power of the equipment is also tested. It is reported that the company's detection capabilities have reached a leading level.

Yu Chaofan believes that at present, the domestic Mobile and new energy industries are booming, and it is an era of rapid development of the component industry. Because they have mastered the ability of rapid component detection, they also have broad market space. “As long as you use electricity, you must use components.” He told the Yangcheng Evening News reporter that they have become a leading enterprise in the domestic component detection field, involving more than 30 downstream enterprises, and the domestic market share is about 30%. However, because their Price is only 1/2 to 2/3 of foreign products, and they have geographical advantages, they will have greater development space in the future.

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