The X-ray Eye — Now in Full Motion

I love looking at PCBs using x-rays. Great for failure analysis. One of the coolest things, I thought, was seeing a PCB tilt in real-time; you get a good sense of the actual spacial relationship between all the layers on a PCB. I took a series of stills today and strung them together into this animation so I could share the experience with you (you’ll need an embedded Flashplayer plug-in to view this movie):

Thanks to concisys (a San Diego-based contract manufacturer) for letting me use their tool to take these images!

13 Responses to “The X-ray Eye — Now in Full Motion”

  1. Sadhu says:

    Wow, this is truly amazing! You should make some more.

  2. Raphael Jacquot says:

    hmm ? what pictures ?

  3. Carmack says:

    Cool! I wish it would rotate in other directions too!
    And you could have made a .gif image…

  4. Mouser says:

    You should apply a brightness correction for the x-ray path length through the PCB so that it doesn’t seem to get so dark at acute angles. The result would be a contrast reduction instead; but it might look better. :) Cool shot, regardless.

  5. e^-(m/r)x says:

    BGA…
    pcba|inspector (phoenix|x-ray) ?

  6. rob says:

    pfft! no blind or buried vias!? :)

  7. rasti says:

    Cool, very original.
    Nex time try with a cell phone, or a notebook !!

  8. mr2000jp says:

    wonderful , but doesnt the xray damage the electronic components on the board , and is this an expensive tool to get?

  9. PCB3D says:

    Nice work, but way too much effort…I’ve created similar 3Ds in real time with Altium PCB software integrated with a third party interface called View3D. It creates a 3D layout of a PCB just as you depicted except it’s in color and you can view it from any axis angle you wish; with or without components, silk screen, or even solder mask……and it looks very lifelike.
    One thing I’ve tried is creating a very thick mulitlayer PCB so I could view the inner layers and planes. It’s interesting to view the vias, blind or otherwise, and other through hole connections as they transverse the layers from top to bottom.
    The downside is you can only save the picture in BMP.

  10. mishele says:

    Awesome!!!w

  11. meetyahya says:

    excelent work
    i can imagin that how far we can go to handle such multy layer boards.
    this is an amazing device. I wish i could have one.
    thanks a lot sir for letting us know.

  12. kemal says:

    i used one of these and it is amazing . you can see everything in pcb