Rolling bearings are key components of rotary machines. To ensure early effective fault diagnosis for bearings, a new rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on variational mode decomposition (VMD) and an improved kernel extreme learning machine (KELM) is proposed in this paper. A fault signal is decomposed via VMD to obtain the intrinsic mode function (IMF) components, and the approximate entropy (ApEn) of the IMF component containing the main fault information is calculated. An eigenvector is created from the approximate entropy of each component. A bearing diagnosis model is created via a KELM; the KELM parameters are optimized using the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to obtain a KELM diagnosis model with optimal parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the diagnosis method proposed in this paper is verified via a fan bearing fault diagnosis test. Under identical conditions, the result is compared with the results obtained using a back propagation (BP) neural network, a conventional extreme learning machine (ELM), and a support vector machine (SVM). The test result shows that the method proposed in this paper is superior to the other three methods in terms of diagnostic accuracy.

The miniaturized electronic products require not only high density, but also high reliability. Defect inspection for the high-density package becomes challenging gradually. In this article, active thermography technology is used to detect the solder balls in flip-chip (FC) packages. A single-layer FC model is constructed and heat conduction in the FC package is simulated by using the finite-element analysis code of COMSOL. Experimental investigation is also carried out to inspect the solder defects by using the laser excitation thermography test system. Infrared images of the SFA1 package are captured, and the spatial adaptive filtering algorithm is used to remove the thermal noise. The hot spots of the solder balls are segmented from the filtered infrared image, and the representative features are extracted for each hot spot. The modified learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network is used for the classification of the solder balls. The missing solder balls are identified accurately. The simulation and experimental results prove that the proposed approach using active thermography and LVQ algorithm is effective for defect inspection in high-density electronic devices.

Solder bump/ball technology has been extensively applied in microelectronic packaging industry. However, the size of solder balls/bumps as well as the pitch are getting smaller and smaller, conventional inspection techniques are insufficient for diagnosis of the defect. It is indispensable to explore new methods for solder joint inspection. In this paper, a nondestructive diagnosis system based on active thermography was proposed. The test vehicles, named as SFA1 and SFA2, were excited by the laser pulse, and the consequent thermal response of the packages were captured by a thermal imager. In order to improve the signal to noise ratio, the polynomial fit and differential absolute contrast (DAC) techniques were utilized to reconstruct the thermal images. Then the statistical features corresponding to each solder ball were extracted from the reconstructed thermal images, and used for clustering analysis with K-Means algorithm. The results show that all the solder balls were recognized accurately, which demonstrates that the intelligent system using active thermography and K-Means algorithm is effective for defects inspection in microelectronic packaging industry.