Dalsa announced its entrance into the solar cell inspection market. The company’s efficiencies and expertise in area scan, line scan, and embedded processing for inspection in the flat-panel display industry are now being successfully applied to solar cell inspection, resulting in high quality, yet cost-effective inspection capabilities for the solar cell industry. Machine vision is used for three general purposes by solar cell manufacturers: product inspection; identification and tracking; and lastly, product assembly. Dalsa’s cameras and hardware are used in the initial part of the quality inspection process to verify patterns and edges, inspect coatings, and to check for micro-cracks. The precision of the image capture and processing technology contributes to the immediate and accurate detection of defects in this critical stage of the manufacturing process.