Applications
Your product will be just as confidential.
AIC never discloses customer identities or product details. Detailed references, acceptance data, and lab visits are available under NDA.
Case 01
Assemble on the board. Don’t singulate.
A leading Taiwan-based notebook camera-module manufacturer supplying top-tier global PC brands. (Identity withheld under NDA — as with all AIC customers.)
The customer needed to assemble camera modules directly on continuous connector boards — not singulated units — at mass-production volume. Existing single-piece AA equipment couldn’t handle the board format, and manual singulation added cost, handling damage, and cycle time. The bar was still full brand acceptance: optical-axis and SFR performance to spec.
AIC designed a full-automatic continuous-board active alignment system, delivered in 2019: board-level material handling, vision-based fiducial correction at every module site, 6DoF active alignment closing the loop on live SFR measurement, and inline dispensing and UV cure — all without singulating the board.
The line reached 90+ UPH — 120+ on continuous board — a 30% throughput gain over the customer’s target, at a 90% mass-production first-pass yield, holding ±0.5 μm linear / ±0.005° angular alignment repeatability. It has run in continuous production ever since.
Case 02
The spec lives in the corners.
An Asia-based Tier-1/2 supplier of automotive and surveillance camera modules. (Identity withheld under NDA.)
Wide-field-of-view lenses put the hardest requirements at the corners of the image: distortion, relative illumination, and corner SFR. The customer’s existing AA process, optimized for centre sharpness, produced units that passed centre specs but failed corner criteria at final test — scrap discovered only after full assembly.
AIC delivered a wide-angle active alignment platform with collimator-based optimization in 2020: multi-field collimator targets sampled across the full field of view, with alignment converging on a merit function weighted across centre and corner fields — catching corner failures at alignment, not at final test.
Corner failures are now caught before dispense and cure, while the parts are still reworkable — moving scrap off the end of the line and back to a recoverable step. The platform was subsequently adopted across additional automotive and surveillance lines.
Case 03
When no barrel can hold the tolerance chain.
A manufacturer of advanced optical modules for camera modules and high-end imaging applications. (Identity withheld under NDA.)
The customer’s optical design stacked 7+ lens groups whose combined tolerance chain could not be held by any mechanical barrel — cumulative centration and tilt errors destroyed performance no matter how tightly each part was machined. The only path was to align each group actively, in free space, against the assembled stack’s measured optical performance.
AIC introduced the Multi-Lens Active Alignment (MLAA) system in 2022: up to 15 degrees of freedom across multiple simultaneous positioners, each lens group aligned against live optical metrology of the growing stack, with per-group adhesive dispense and staged UV cure. In effect, the machine replaces the barrel as the precision reference.
On a design previously considered unmanufacturable, MLAA improved field curvature by 50% and held design yield at 95%+ — across 15 degrees of freedom and 7+ lens groups per assembly. It is now the reference platform for the customer’s next-generation roadmap.
