Noncontact linear scanner has 3 m span

Engineers at CMOS Sensor (Cupertino, CA) have developed an industrial linear scanner (ILS) built from a long, contiguous row of CMOS linear image sensors. It uses an array of rod lenses to form the image, as in contact-image-sensor modules; however, in the ILS, the scanned object can be up to 14 mm from the input window and the object can be up to 3 m wide. The engineers based the ILS on the company’s line-sensor devices with electronic global shuttering so that the ILS would permit line-scan systems integrators to use their usual illumination sources—LED, fiber, or fluorescent. The scan controller accommodates up to four colors of sequential illumination of unequal brightness, encompassing RGB or other multispectral imaging.

The ILS scans up to 20,000 lines per second at a resolution of 600 dpi without parallax error. The device is suitable for inspecting high-speed webs and large-area flat items like glass, plastics, and wood, and is intended for high-volume production-line applications such as the manufacture of large LCD displays or assembled solar panels. Contact Gregory Gallinat at [email protected].