Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1161956
50 SMT007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2019 develop from that. At our core, we focus on four areas encom- passing electronics manufacturing and a little bit in general electronics. We start out at the design of the PCB, then move to the materials and fabrication—includ- ing the acceptance of PCB materials—as well as the assembly area—such as the materi- als, equipment involved, workmanship of the assembly product, and associated rework and modification of both board and assemblies. As of January of this year, we have a tighter affiliation agreement with the Wire Harness Manufacturers Association (WHMA), and I also serve as executive director of WHMA. That is a reflection of a long collaboration between the two associations in the wire harness arena. We have a workmanship standard on wire harness as well as some design documents. We were looking to expand that in support of some of the automotive efforts we're pursuing. We develop standards for enclosure work and the component area, particularly as it supports electronics assembly manufacturing. And we have become involved in some corpo- rate social responsibility, particularly with our standardization in China. We have a series of data standards that support companies if they have to report either conflict minerals or mate- rial safety concerns, such as Restriction of Haz- ardous Substances (RoHS) and Registration, Evaluation, Authorization, and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH). Johnson: With such a long history in stan- dards with IPC, a lot of things have evolved and changed over the years. Right now, what does IPC see as the most strategic places to be doing standards work right now? Bergman: We have a core of standards, and the industry expects our core to be well-supported. I would consider our core activities to be the long-time offering and most popular stan- dards. We have IPC-A-600 for printed board acceptability and the specification for PCBs (IPC-6012). For electronics assembly, we have IPC-A-610 for assembly workmanship, J-STD- 001 for soldering, and IPC/WHMA-A-620 for wire harness workmanship in addition to IPC- 7711/21 for rework and repair of PCBs and PCBAs. We continue to support those with training and certification programs, and they are heavily used globally by the industry. If you look to the ones we are working on, they're not closer to leading-edge but are stra- tegic in supporting the industry and fall into a few categories. For Industry 4.0, we are putting significant effort toward supporting companies assembling in smart manufacturing modes. The standard that we have for that is the IPC- 2591, Connected Factory Exchange (CFX), which was released in the spring. IPC-2591/CFX is intended to be a common set of messages that will allow plug-and-play for manufacturing lines. We figured that IPC- 2591, v. 1.0, would get the industry to 85% use - fulness, and then we could start adding to the standard from there once companies started working on the implementation of v. 1.0. We expect v. 1.1 to come out Q4 of this year. The industry is currently in the process of imple - menting it; equipment manufacturers are com- mitting to their roadmaps for implementation, and we are actively updating the standard with various versions. We also cooperate with an industry consor- tium called The Hermes Standard Initiative, which is a group of companies that developed a digital machine-to-machine interface stan- dard. Their intent was to replace some of the hard wire standardization that was called the IPC-9851 SMEMA standards. The Hermes Ini- tiative document, which we designated IPC- HERMES-9852, is what some have called "dig- ital SMEMA." Hermes is mostly line control; it's not going to get you to Industry 4.0 smart factory, but it has some unique features that we felt were important to support as an indus- try association. For the PCB side, we have IPC-2581. Essen- tially, it's a data file that completely identi- fies the assembly. If you're sending this file, Dave Bergman