Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1058015
DECEMBER 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 25 not just one or two companies or certain of companies—abso- lutely everyone that is involved is going to benefit from this. As we've been talking about CFX, the business processes have been put into place as well. That is what drives the achievement of that criti- cal mass of adoption for the standard, which I believe is happening behind the scenes right now. A lot of companies have taken on board their own demonstrations. They've set it up in their own workshops and are starting to go out and explain it to custom- ers proactively. We've had people come along recently and say, "The software development kit (SDK) that we have is completely free of charge from IPC and it is so easy for people to adopt CFX, but what about smaller pieces of equipment?" We had one company with soldering irons. How do you embed a whole infrastructure of an industrial internet of things (IIoT) standard within a soldering iron? They came up with a solution. It's a five-millime- ter square chip, and they're running a Linux- based software development kit and producing CFX messages directly and natively from their soldering irons. This is something I hope we are going to see at IPC APEX EXPO 2019—the fact that it's not just the big expensive machines now. The majority of the machines that actually exist in the factory are smaller, bespoke, niche, special- ist, and even homemade for the functional testers. We're even talking about a method to integrate all of that within CFX as well. It means that the excitement is reaching areas that, from what we've seen in the past in terms of communication, it has never even gone to. It's never even been able to get kind of close to these areas. But CFX, even now that we are imminently close to publication, has already started to reach these kinds of people. It's really exciting to see it coming together because that marks the sustainability for CFX in the future. We've had an incredible year with so many people providing contri- butions and ideas, and getting together and talking. Even direct competitors are willing to talk to each other and help each other out in certain areas. It's been an amazing ride. The milestone of getting this first revision, as Dave said, has everything in there that we need to establish this as a real, usable, and valuable industry standard, and we will have further messages to come. On this publication date, we're going to find a lot of people who already have embed- ded CFX into their machines. We have around 40–50 different machine types that already have CFX. Many people are already develop- ing and close to having full support for their machines. This was an amazing year from the first initial public demo all the way through now to a published standard, and not only that, but the actual implementation being supported as well. Matties: When you look at a visitor at the show, how will they tour the CFX demonstration? Is it a booth-by-booth tour, or what's it going to look like? Bergman: Barry, we're physically planning to build assemblies at the show, so we will have two manufacturing lines—one with CFX only, and one with both CFX and Hermes. The plan is to put a bare board on, have an assembled board come out at the other end, and show users a variety of flat panel displays and the related the data, or they can monitor that on their phones. I can tell you that when the Birmingham event took place, you could monitor what was going on with one of the reflow ovens includ- ing what the temperature was in each zone of Dave Bergman