What Nordson’s faster acoustic inspection changes for package panels

Acoustic inspection has two jobs to finish before a package panel can move on: acquire a useful image and decide which features are defects. Nordson’s SonoFlex addresses both, pairing faster scanning with software intended to separate genuine voids from acceptable structures.

The system has won SEMI and Semiconductor Digest’s Best of West award. Its more useful distinction is the architecture behind the throughput claim. Nordson reports scanning at twice the speed of legacy systems, using its pulser and transducer technology. Up to four machines can operate alongside one another, taking the claimed aggregate increase to eight times. That larger figure describes a group of systems, rather than an eightfold improvement in one scanner.

### Finding the defect inside the image

Acoustic inspection uses sound to examine internal interfaces. A discontinuity changes the returning signal, allowing inspection of features that cannot be assessed from the package surface alone. Different depths can be examined through separate time gates, so image interpretation must account for where a feature sits as well as how strongly it reflects.

SonoFlex combines new FlexCore software with Nordson’s Multi-Gate Image Analysis. The latter uses machine learning to recognise acceptable and defective patterns, exclude acceptable features from void counts and combine information from different acoustic images against configured failure criteria.

Nordson gives a revealing example in its software documentation: regularly positioned calibration voids can have the same pixel value as actual defects. The model is trained to treat those calibration features as background. A simple count of equally bright pixels would not make that distinction.

This makes the classification recipe part of the inspection process. Changing a package’s layout can change what the software should accept, even if the acoustic hardware remains the same. A throughput comparison therefore needs the panel design, scan settings and acceptance criteria alongside the number of units inspected per hour. <p><a href="https://www.semi.org/en/semi-press-release/nordson-sonoflex-acoustic-system-wins-2026-best-of-west-award">SEMI award and performance claims</a>. <a href="https://www.nordson.com/en/Products/Test-and-Inspection-Products/AMI-Sonoflex">Nordson SonoFlex product information</a>. <a href="https://www.nordson.com/en/products/test-and-inspection-products/nordson-intelligence-ami-mgia">Nordson Multi-Gate Image Analysis</a>.</p>