NATICK, Mass., June 15 -- Cognex Corp. has received an order for its machine vision systems worth $11.8 million from Shinkawa, Ltd., a Japan-based manufacturer of semiconductor production equipment. The new purchase order--the largest Cognex has received in its 18 years of operation--comes only one month after an earlier order from Shinkawa, valued in excess of $350,000, for the same product. The latest order raises the total value of orders received from Shinkawa in the last few months to over $12 million. Shinkawa expects delivery of the Cognex products covered by both of these purchase orders to be complete within the next seven quarters.Shinkawa will integrate the Cognex vision systems into its wire bonding, die bonding, and tape bonding equipment. These automated, high-speed, and highly accurate machines attach and assemble semiconductor die to lead frames and other substrates during semiconductor chip manufacturing. The Cognex vision systems are integrated into each bonding machine to guide and monitor the bonding process by automatically determining where the connections between the die and the lead frame should be made.