Agilent Technologies is in a demanding electronics manufacturing test market, and they promise to help their customers Cut Costs, Build Profits, Compete to Win. So when Agilent's engineering team began a re-design of their flagship automated optical inspection system for printed-circuit boards, their customers' demands were clear: higher performance, higher throughput, increased reliability and lower costs. Agilent's customers perform high precision surface mount PCB assembly, and look to Agilent for AOI (automated optical inspection) systems throughout their SMT lines.

With the design goals set, Agilent began formally evaluating motion vendors. Barry Eppler elaborated, "We identified all the potential motion network architectures first, including the established suppliers, those that were new to the market but up and coming, and even some that were still in development. We chose the SynqNet® digital motion network architecture and an XMP-SynqNet solution. We qualified several different servo drives and ultimately used CD SynqNet drives from Kollmorgen."

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