Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1212069
REAL TIME WITH... IPC APEX EXPO 2020 SHOW & TELL MAGAZINE I I-CONNECT007 125 Tom Salmon SEMI, Executive Director of Fab Owners Alliance Nolan Johnson: What are your impressions of the show? Tom Salmon: I'm impressed by what I've seen and the variety of solutions. Industry 4.0 is still a big thing here. I'm guessing just by the number of attendees that we took a little bit of a hit from the coronavirus. But most of the people I've talked to are happy with the meet- ings that they're having with folks. Overall, it seems to be positive for everybody. Johnson: What themes do you see? Salmon: For us, it's all about connectivity. We're driving toward closed-loop communi- cations within the facilities and on the manu- facturing floor. That's why we're presenting with the SMT-ELS suite of standards. We had a user group meeting yesterday and were able to communicate out to a number of key users in the audience. Again, we're just try- ing to show better connectivity. SMT-ELS is a great replacement for SMEMA. It's a bolt- on application. You don't have to buy new equipment; you can bolt-on DLCs, as well, to get that horizontal machine-to-machine com- munications. Johnson: What customers are finding this par- ticularly interesting? Salmon: We had a mix of people. We got the message out as much as we can to the major EMS companies, but a couple of the EMS com- panies from Asia were not able to send people because of the coronavirus. We ended up with a few ODMs, in addition to EMS companies, that very interested in machine-to-machine communications. _______________________ Joel Scutchfield Koh Young, Director of Sales for the Americas Kelly Dack: What are your reactions to the show this year? Joel Scutchfield: Based on traffic and atten- dance, we have had a great week. We had 40+ more scans than what we did last year at this point, and we're waiting for the final tally today. We're expecting to have 80–100 more booth visitors than last year, and we had a good year last year, too, so that tells me that things are happening. A lot of the traffic has been very high quality. People are planning to invest and do things within the year, which tells me that the industry is growing, and that's what we want. The economy is still strong. Dack: Have you had a chance to walk the floor very much? Scutchfield: I'll spend the next couple of hours wandering around and looking at things. We hear a lot of ongoing smart fabrication and Industry 4.0 discussions. Some of the inter- views I've been involved with surrounded that, along with the future of manufacturing in the U.S. in general. Each year, there's more con- nectivity between the partners and systems. CFX is playing a part in that, but that seems to be the common thing as an aggregate specific to inspection through the whole inspection, which seems to be on the forefront. Confor- mal coding inspection is something that a lot of people are interested in, as well. _______________________ Heston Singh Unitron, Director of Sales and Business Development Nolan Johnson: What has been your exhibi- tor experience?