Machine Vision at Photon Trade Show in Stuttgart

2010, April 27th - 29th the 6th Photon Photovoltaic Technology Show took place in Stuttgart, Germany. The show claims to be the world´s leading trade fair for machinery and processing materials used in the production of wafers, cells and solar modules.

As already seen at many events related to the “new energies” more and more companies and visitors coming from other industries are pushing into this market trying to get additional business there. However, it needs to be questioned how many trade shows for photovoltaic really are necessary.

Really impressive for everybody interested in inspection technology was the presence of camera based systems and solutions. Inspection obviously is already an accepted technology for this industry. Similar to other industries such as electronics and semiconductor, machine builders and line builders integrated the technology into their equipment. This is for sure no surprise due to the fact that many of these companies are coming from the formerly mentioned industries.

 

One of the most interesting application that was shown by several companies was EL (Electroluminescence) testing. Another one was micro crack detection. So overall the trade fair showed a strong presence of machine vision in many different applications supplied by OEM´s, system integrators and machine vision companies alike.