Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1083315
70 I-CONNECT007 I REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2019 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE Two Full CFX Demo Lines at IPC APEX EXPO 2019 by Dan Feinberg I-CONNECT007 Dan Feinberg spoke with David Bergman— IPC VP of standards and technology—at IPC APEX EXPO 2019 about CFX, IPC's Connected Factory Exchange software used for machine- to-machine communication. With 80+ com- panies now supporting CFX, IPC set up two full lines to be demonstrated at the show. Dan Feinberg: Hi David. It's good to see you again. Let's talk about CFX. This is something that has been relatively new to me, but as I've looked at it over the past couple of days knowing that you were going to be here, it's something that I find very interesting. And I see a tremendous amount of interest in it here at the show. Why don't we start by assuming that there are a lot of people like me who don't know what CFX is in detail. David Bergman: It's good to talk to you, Dan. At its basic level, CFX stands for the Connected Factory Exchange. What it's intended to do is facilitate machine-to-machine and machine- to-manufacturing-execution-systems commu- nication and become the common language between these systems. IPC CFX will serve as the foundation of Industry 4.0, the fourth industrial revolution. Industry 4.0 and smart factories are used somewhat interchangeably. What the industry recognized was there had been multiple attempts over the years to facilitate machine-to-machine communication. IPC's Board of Directors brought up 4.0 at one meeting about four years ago, I didn't know anything about it. I read a lot—as much as I could find on Google—and it seemed like a marketing effort. When they said, "We have to get equipment companies all to agree to work together and have their machines speak the same language," I thought, "There's no way that's going to happen." Some companies have been working on 4.0 implementations, but they want you to buy everything from them. Three years ago, we had a meeting in Las Vegas. I entered the meeting room, and approx- imately 80% of the world's capital equipment companies were represented. They were seri- ous about finding some way to work together. What had changed was the customer demand. The customer said, "This is needed. We're not going to buy everything from you. We need to mix and match. It's too difficult to get our machines to communicate with each other now, so we need a better way. We need a stan- dard." Now, there were standards out there, but the committee concluded these were inadequate.