Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1083315
REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2019 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE I I-CONNECT007 71 "We're trying to do more. There's more IoT coming and communication taking place. We need something that's going to be somewhat future proof. How are we going to approach this?" They spent over a year looking at differ- ent formats because there are many communi- cation standards out there. SEMI has one, IPC had CAMX—which the committee considered upgrading—so there were a number of formats out there. But the question was, "Will the options be sufficient? Which direction should we go?" After a year and a half, they finally decided. They needed something secure because every- body was worried about data security in their factories. They also wanted a protocol that allowed customizing a piece of equipment such as adding a bar code reader or vision system or not. They wanted to have all these options to communicate to the system. The committee concluded to look at the approach as a series of building blocks or in other words to say, "I have building blocks. We're going to create messages for all of these different blocks." The building block concept gained traction. We ended up selecting AMQP, which is a com- munication protocol that the banking industry uses. We felt it enabled significant security. AMQP also doesn't require a broker, so every message doesn't have to go through a central point. You can have machine-to-machine com- munication, which is perfect for the smart fac- tory. If solder paste inspection equipment can talk to a solder paste printer, one can start to build feedback loops. Feinberg: Or maybe even a soldering robot such as those being shown here. Bergman: Correct. They felt that they were onto something. As they started to talk about individual messages, more companies became involved and the standard began to take form. The industry worked very hard on this. Some key events made this significantly easier than previous efforts. We had a company develop a software development kit (SDK). The SDK makes it easier for a company to output CFX messages—to go from their native machine language into CFX. Our first CFX demonstration was at IPC APEX EXPO 2018 because we wanted to show CFX was possible. At that time, we managed to show 22 companies with 34–40 machines on the show floor pushing CFX messages to the cloud and back to attendees' cellphones so they could monitor what was going on. If you went to one of the booths and they had a piece of machinery speaking CFX, it was running or simulating running. When they opened it, it