case study

Camtek

Products

AQTime

Camtek designs, develops, manufactures and markets technologically advanced, cost-effective systems and related software products that are used to enhance processes and yields. Camtek provides intelligent optical inspection systems to the Semiconductor Manufacturing and Packaging, High-Density Interconnect Substrates (HDI-S), and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) industries. Camtek addresses the specific needs of each industry with dedicated solutions, based on a common core of intelligent imaging technologies.

Camtek creates and sells technologically advanced, cost-effective software-intensive products. They used AQtime to debug and improve the performance of their PVS verification station.

Camtek’s PVS is an efficient and intelligent verification station with a space saving footprint. Combined with Camtek’s Pegasus proven detection capabilities, it defines a new standard in yield assurance for CSP and BGA substrate production. PVS operation is based on a smart, computer-guided, process that reduces verification time.

Solution

Camtek strives constantly to further increase the throughput and productivity of their systems. AQTime helps them reduce development cycle times and meet their customer’s needs.

In addition, Camtek runs the profiler when testing new computers for their complex software. “Again, the detailed reports make it easy to use it as a benchmark for our own software. AQTime helped us choose a PC for our software to run on. By running benchmark tests and comparing the timing reports produced by AQTime, we saw which computer had the best performance”.

“We needed a tool that could pinpoint bottlenecks in one of our products, the PVS verification station. AQTime analyzed our software smoothly and found some bottlenecks and helped optimizing the station performance.”

— Shraga Broyer, from Camtek

Hours to Minutes

While profiling PVS with AQtime, Camtek discovered a routine that caused a performance bottleneck and further research showed that the culprit was using a certain third party “load” function. They replaced it and it made all the difference. “If I had to find the bottleneck by hand, including additional compilations, it would have taken hours. With AQtime it only took minutes.”

“AQtime pinpoints problematic routines extremely fast. We are able to see immediately which routines take the longest time to run.”