Robot CT laminography of a motherboard

Laminography trajectory

Because the motherboard is very flat and thin, x-rays that would travel parallel to the plane would not penetrate the motherboard. A standard circular CT scan would not capture sufficient data.
With a laminography trajectory however we can capture a great amount of data by moving the source and the detector in parallel to the motherboard plane.

Metal artifacts

Materials with high density differences are challenging for industry standard CT reconstruction software and typically produce beam-hardening and scattering artifacts.

Geometric errors

The x-ray source and detector were mounted on two robotic arms. Robotic arms are not quite as accurate as well-calibrated rails of a lab-CT system. These geometric errors usually produce artifacts and blurriness after a reconstruction with standard CT reconstruction software.

Photo of the motherboard

Step 1: Robot CT laminography scan

We scanned the motherboard using the advanced robotic CT system from Omni NDE. Because both the source and the detector are mounted on robotic arms, these arms could be moved parallel to the motherboard to capture a massive amount of data (17689 projections).

Omni NDE twin-robotic CT

Step 2: Reconstruction with Voxray

We reconstructed the data with our Voxray QRT software. Only because of unique key capabilities of the software were we able to reconstruct the data in excellent quality:

• Support for arbitrary CT scanning trajectories - in this case a laminography scan.
• Automatic geometry correction - The Voxray QRT software can automatically correct for geometric errors per projection which means that inaccuracies due to movement in the robotic arms are not a big deal.
• Almost no artifacts due to a more accurate physical model in the Voxray QRT algorithm.