1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an inspection technique for detecting the deviation of an IC component mounted on a PC board and a technique for generating inspection logic for use in the inspection.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hitherto, PC board inspecting apparatuses for inspecting the quality of surface-mount soldering on printed circuit boards on which a number of electronic components are mounted have been proposed. In particular, as the throughput of information processors has improved in recent years, the number of apparatuses proposed for capturing an image of a PC board or a part of the PC board by an image capturing apparatus and conducting board inspection by an image process has been increasing.
One method for inspecting the deviation of IC component is a method of determining occurrence of a component deviation by detecting a color other than the color of the component body (for example, the color of the board) in an area in which a component body is to be disposed. The method is effective for square chips and transistors but has a technical drawback in inspection of an IC component. Since the area of the body of an IC component is much larger than that of square chips and transistors, if colors in all of the areas in which components are to be disposed are checked, process time increases and it becomes difficult to realize real-time board inspection. In addition, an image of the whole area in which component bodies are to be disposed has to be processed and recorded. Consequently, a large amount of memory or the storage capacity in the image storing apparatus required becomes very large. As a result, this increases the cost of the apparatus.