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Lloyd Doyle at 30: Roy Lloyd Reflects
January 17, 2012 |Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Lloyd Doyle, based in Surrey, UK, manufactures and supplies automatic optical inspection (AOI), test and scanning solutions to the electronics and associated industries. Founded in 1982 by Roy Lloyd and Dr. Keith Doyle to develop industrial automation products, the company is celebrating its 30th anniversary and the original partners continue to lead the business. Lloyd reflects upon the origin and evolution of the company with Editor Pete Starkey, who, in his manufacturing days, was an early adopter of Lloyd Doyle PCB inspection equipment.
Pete Starkey: Roy, the Lloyd Doyle brand has been synonymous with automated optical test systems for a generation, and we must have known each other for best part of 25 years. But how and where did it all begin?Roy Lloyd: My Association with Keith Doyle began at BP Research in Sunbury, where I was employed as an applied physicist, and Keith joined fresh out of Cambridge University. We worked in the same laboratory, building instrumentation for the research group until Keith went off to do his PhD. Meanwhile, I started a company to develop applications for lasers, and Keith joined me there. We did some very interesting work--putting the holes in rubber teats for babies’ bottles without using hot needles or hollow punches was one pioneering laser application. And we developed a laser engraving machine for flexographic printing. A laser guidance system for tunnelling was another successful development--the company ZED Tunnel Guidance Ltd., which has been going since 1975, has supplied equipment for nearly all the major tunnelling projects world-wide, including the Channel Tunnel. But that’s another story.Anyway, in 1982 Keith and I left and set up Lloyd Doyle with the objective of developing innovative solutions to industrial problems, and we undertook many custom engineering projects, from illumination systems for the Bank of England Printing works for the automatic inspection of bank notes to satellite launching systems.Starkey: And what led you into inspecting and testing PCBs?Lloyd: Keith was designing electronics and we were buying-in PCBs in small, often one-off quantities. Trouble was, they didn’t always work! And the suppliers we were using didn’t have any means of meaningfully checking their functionality. There were some early AOI systems on the market, but these worked on design rule and feature recognition and a lot of the time they could only recognize very simple features; they didn’t tell you anything about connectivity. Some people were doing electrical test, but only to golden board comparison, and that’s not a lot of use on a one-off! We saw an opportunity for automated optical testing and began developing the technology, with the cooperation of the Ferranti PCB factory in Oldham, and launched the first system in 1984. This attracted a lot of attention and was featured in the BBC news and the Financial Times.
Starkey: So you had effectively produced an optical inspection system based on connectivity?
Lloyd: Yes, and this was a unique characteristic of our equipment. Development continued over the next two years, with the help of Mania--the early systems used the base of the Alpha-01 drilling machine as a platform for our optics and electronics--and we brought the TRACKSCAN, a reflective light based optical test system, to the market in 1986. Apart from the obvious technical benefits, the connectivity principle gave us some commercial advantages. For example we were able to supply the equipment to Russia because our principle of operation meant that we did not contravene export regulations, whereas feature recognition systems were not allowed, and that was a very good market until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. We went through quite a tough time over the next couple of years; there was a big slump in the PCB industry and people just weren’t buying equipment. It was around that time we got into conversation with your people at Forward Circuits.
Starkey: Roy, I remember it well--1991 I believe. It was during my time as Technical Director and we were on a mission! We had done a lot of pioneering work on electrical testing to net-list reference, and wanted to close the loop on automated optical inspection so that we could verify the integrity of our inner layers against the same database. We had looked at a succession of AOI systems, but none was capable of doing what we wanted and, quite honestly, the majority of suppliers were not interested in supporting us. In fact, for the most part, they did not even recognise what we trying to achieve. We believed that the TRACKSCAN had the potential to fulfil the requirement, and that was the starting point of a very constructive working relationship.
Lloyd: Not without its ups and downs as I recall! But both parties gained a lot of knowledge and capability as a result, and we saw it as another milestone in the evolution of automated optical test.
Starkey: It was a great privilege to be invited to recount my TRACKSCAN experiences at the 1995 AOI User Group meeting in Forest Grove Oregon and to see the amount of interest that was generated when you exhibited the following week at the IPC APEX EXPO in San Diego, California.
Lloyd: Not to mention the Long Island Iced Tea at the Gala on the roof of the Convention Centre! Too much information--suffice it to say we had a remarkably good show.
Starkey: Roy, give me an idea how Lloyd Doyle equipment has progressed since the mid-90s.
Lloyd: At that time, the TRACKSCAN 4000 was well established as the state-of-the-art optical test for the PCB manufacturing industry. The EXCALIBUR range of systems represented a step change in technology with higher scan speeds and higher resolution, and opened up the high-volume sector of the market to Lloyd Doyle. EXCALIBUR has been continually developed and today provides the most cost effective way of finding faults on PCB layers. The illumination and image capture systems have continued to evolve, but the basic AOT fault detection logic has not changed since its inception. The last 10 years have seen the introduction of redline, phasor and duotech. redline has a new illumination system including optics and electronics and a new imaging system, integrated with proven components from the EXCALIBUR range. phasor is a fluorescent CCD based system suitable for optical test of contemporary laminates. duotech combines the technology of redline and phasor, with reflective light and fluorescent illumination systems in the same machine. This combination gives maximum flexibility to optically test all copper clad laminates including low contrast materials, as well as phototools and dry film resists. And we make a range of repair stations to complement the range of test systems.
Starkey: And I believe you have diversified into the integrated circuits packaging industry.
Lloyd: Yes, Our IBIS system uses laser interferometry for high-speed two- and three-dimensional inspection and measurement of solder bumps. More recently we have introduced a high-speed laser scanner for surface profile measurements in general industrial applications.
Starkey: So what do you think the next 30 years holds for Lloyd Doyle?
Lloyd: Nobody’s got that good a crystal ball! But I think it’s true to say that PCB technology is not moving as fast as it did through the microvia and high-density interconnect revolution. Existing AOT systems have got the capability to satisfy most requirements, so people are not rushing to replace them. Although we are seeing a lot of developments in printed electronics, I think the PCB will remain the predominant means of supporting and interconnecting silicon for at least the next 10 to 15 years.We had a very successful productronica show, although there have been some dramatic changes in the geography of the PCB industry, we see a lot of potential still in the European and Russian markets. So we will go forward in a positive spirit, continue to be flexible, creative and innovative and see what the future brings.