by indexing pin 32 at the debris removal and inspection area 31 as the chips 12 pass from indexing pin 26 to indexing pin 32 they slide under the debris removal system 34 the debris removal system 34 may employ suction forced air and or other methods known in the art to clean the surface 54 fig7 of the chip 12 without disturbing the markings thereon not shown moreover any marking material that remains in the recovered residue may be reprocessed for future chip marking the chip 12 adjacent the indexing pin 32 is then inspected by the camera 36 which may be a ccd camera or other suitable camera known in the art that is the camera 36 photographs the image of the surface 54 of the chip 12 and the markings contained thereon and sends this image to a central processing unit such as cpu 80 in fig1 the image received by the cpu 80 is broken down into individual pixels and the pixels are compared to a minimum standard once the image is received and compared by the cpu 80 each chip 12 is released by the indexing pin 32 the adjacent upstream chips 12 are maintained in position by the indexing pin 38 until each is released for inspection if the chip 12 released by the indexing pin 32 is acceptable according to the comparison made by the cpu 80 then the chip 12 is allowed to slide on the track 14 to the final staging area 40 if.