Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1305670
42 SMT007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2020 facturer will see the value and not have to say, "I have to scrub my whole line because I want to do this Industry 4.0." Johnson: That's a valid point. That's one of the things that CFX, as a protocol, is attempt- ing to accomplish: the ability to communicate seamlessly and clearly across multiple vendors using a common language. Webb: As you may know, we are involved with CFX. But to take what Bert said just a little bit further, we don't actually require a machine to be CFX compliant to extract data from it. Not to take anything away from CFX at all because it's a good deal. It will make life easier. But we've been able to interface for many years with any number of machines because we have custom parts and everything that can identify the information that we need to get out of a particular machine. Once the CFX standard is in place, that makes our job even easier to get the data and information coming from these machines. Johnson: It sounds like you have a library of an old-fashioned middleware as well. Webb: That's correct. Johnson: Let's say that at final inspection, you're looking at the board. It has been assem- bled, the components have been placed on it, and now inspection sees on this particular job a statistical bump for a handful of passives over on this one corner of the board, where they're starting to tombstone a bit more than normal. That indicates that something needs to adjust upstream to ensure a better solder paste application. Is that something that you can be a part of today? Webb: Absolutely. If you start to see process shifts or process deviations that are happen- ing, then flags are going to be set up to iden- tify that within the QUAD tool. Not only does it automate the repair loop as we talked about, but it also produces all of your usual process- related charts and graphs and all that—any sort of alarms and stops that you want if things start to drift and go haywire. You can do that today, and we have customers doing exactly that. Johnson: Is that implemented in the form of flags to operators?