Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1035071
OCTOBER 2018 I SMT007 MAGAZINE 15 which is why I don't think they're competing, in a way. Bergman: They serve different purposes. We have been discussing this for some time because both standards are industry-driven standards. They're intended for somewhat different purposes, though there are portions that overlap. When IPC and the SMEMA Coun- cil merged in the late 1990s, we had a series of standards, and the SMEMA Council created IPC-SMEMA-9851, which was the connectivity of machines for line control. So that one manu- facturer's piece of equipment can tell the next one that something is coming. Simple messages like, "I'm sending a board. It's coming down the line. Be ready to receive." The other one says, "Okay, I got it. It's coming." In those cases, a lot of it was hard-wired. The Hermes standard was intended to change that to software to make it easier for modification. Again, it was still intended for line control, not for factory control. Hermes doesn't pull information out of the manufacturing line for any kind of analysis. It's intended to control the manufacturing line. That's an excellent purpose, and because of that focus, Hermes messages are very light or small, which is a benefit because now the Hermes standard can be used with a conveyor. If the messages are small, the conveyors can handle the message size and do their job. We are looking to create messaging within CFX to take advantage of that capability of Hermes. Las Marias: What about from the equipment manufacturers? What would be the buy-in so that they will install the CFX standard in their machines? Bergman: You'd think it would be counterin- tuitive; at least when we started the initial discussion for creating CFX, I didn't expect the equipment manufacturers would want to work together at all; basically, if I'm an equipment company, I'm helping my customer to be able to be more flexible in their choice. They're not tied to me. I said it would never work, because really, if I'm selling a piece of equipment, I want people to buy everything from me. However, when we held our first CFX meet- ing and I walked into a small meeting room in Las Vegas at IPC APEX EXPO, we had 80% of the world's supply of equipment in one tiny room. Something had changed. Or at least, my perception was I was wrong in my previous assumption that they wouldn't work together. I believe the customers are driving this, that they are demanding this flexibility. In the end, I think that the equipment suppliers recog- nized they don't want to get blamed every time there is some little adapter that goes wrong, or somebody makes a change in a custom- written software solution and their equipment gets blamed. They don't want that headache each time. The advantage is you eliminate all those. You have one common language, and they're in control of the messaging. You take all of these custom-written software applica- tions and eliminate the need for them. I think that offers everyone, both sides, the equipment suppliers as well as the customers, a signifi- cant cost savings long-term. It was clear from their participation and their demand that we're doing something good when we started down this path. We have 250 people on the CFX commit- tee right now in the U.S. We have a separate committee that's discussing the same topic in Chinese in our Asia Pacific office, ninety-some- thing people there and growing. More people are saying, "This can really help our manufac- turing operations if we can make this a real- ity." I believe now it would be really tough for somebody to say, "I don't really have a plan to do anything with CFX," because the customers are going to drive it. Las Marias: Dave, the CFX was showcased at APEX earlier this year, and then you also did a demo at the recent SMT Hybrid Packaging Event in Nuremberg. What are the importance of those demonstrations? And how did the industry react? Bergman: In all my years at IPC, it's prob- ably within my top five coolest things that IPC has ever done. This is an industry first.