The manufacturing of a printed circuit board in the SMT assembly line goes through multiple phases of automatic handling. To ensure the quality of the board and reduce the number of defects, inspection tasks such as solder paste inspection and automatic optical inspection are conducted. The inspection tasks are carried out at various phases of the assembly line. The paper aims to answer the questions of how machine learning technology can contribute for better PCB fault detection in the assembly line and at which parts of the assembly line this technology has been applied. The paper discusses the PCB defect detection by using machine learning and other approaches. The current research shows that PCB defect detection using machine learning are miniscule. Early detection is still unexplored and experimented in the industry.
