In other words, don't make scrap, and build the ability to produce without making scrap into the production process itself. So there's a strong focus throughout the American manufacturing sector to improve quality and aim at zero defects, and the way you get there is with machine vision. These systems combine cameras with PCs, which are getting increasingly powerful, and frame grabbers to convert and digitize what is in the cameras and put that into the computer. All of this is done in a matter of seconds at some very high speeds, matching the speed of high-throughput production lines. But there is another, perhaps, more important benefit.
Machine vision is right in the mainstream of where manufacturing is going.
The use of machine vision is skyrocketing and it's accelerated both by demand and by the sharp drop in the price of the technology and computers. These are large scale manufacturers and they really had to have machine vision for inspection and quality control. You can't inspect what you can't see, which is true of the faults and minor imperfections in semiconductor devices and chips. Those were the first major ones. In terms of the semiconductors, you find vision used as the sight in all kinds of manufacturing and inspection equipment.