Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1502623
44 SMT007 MAGAZINE I JULY 2023 Article by Chris Jorgensen IPC I hear that train a comin' It's rollin' 'round the bend And it's making limited stops on its way to taking electronics manufacturers to Industry 4.0. at last line may not have made it into Johnny Cash's final lyrics for "Folsom Prison Blues," but it fits a lot better into a technical piece vs. the guy in Reno who did make it into the original lyrics. ere is an IPC-CFX train building momen- tum. It seems like every time we turn around, we hear about more progress being made— some we can report and some we can't—and it shows that if your company hasn't started its own IPC-CFX journey, it's time to book your ticket and hop on board. The IPC-CFX Train Is Approaching Your Station We see increasing signs that show expanded utilization of the plug-and-play, machine-to- machine communication standard, as well as future-looking ways in which IPC-CFX can help EMS and OEM companies meet their long-term factory automation and data analyt- ics objectives. Conversations with solution providers, such as developers of manufacturing execution so- ware (MES), reveal that many are encouraging their customers to adopt IPC-CFX because they can focus their time on getting full value from equipment data rather than spending time on translating proprietary languages and protocols between equipment on the line. Equipment vendors continue to demon- strate through the IPC-CFX Qualified Prod- ucts List (QPL) that their equipment's IPC-