Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1536435
42 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JUNE 2025 technician, or equipment manager receives a notification that a trend has been recog- nized and is being managed. e machine is self-changing. In an extreme case where the defect cannot be solved, creating an issue for the rest of the panels on the line, it will stop the line and send that notification. You can also generate rules specific to your environment or your shop floor. All notifica- tions are configurable in any frequency, for- mat, and to any target device. Nowadays, the notification center complexity has no limits. How does the machine and the software learn? It does several things. Among others, it col- lects real-time and historical data to train the models describing a problem so that they can detect or predict it. In the ramp-up/validation phase, both the model and human operator have to agree. If they don't and a correction is needed, the information goes back into the model, and the model has to learn. What are the IP concerns that customers have, and the protections this machine offers? In general, IP is a concern. Any IIoT platform already brings up those issues, but the opti- cal inspection raises the concerns to an even higher level because these are actual pic- tures of the products. In the ideal scenario, whoever provides the soware solutions to the PCB manufacturer provides soware and hardware solutions to process that data. en they can assure the customer that the data is staying and being processed locally in real time. However, the cloud is important because it generally allows a quicker upscal- ing when needed, with multiple manufactur- ing tools/shopfloors/sites. e concern can be solved when there are clear access policies between the tool/solu- tion provider and the customer. It's just a matter of defining the rules of the game with the customer regarding who has access to what, when, and how. Of course, it might be necessary to look at a picture of a panel if something is wrong, but this can be limited and agreed upon. eoretically, a soware/tool vendor could sell the model without any data and tell the customer to train it with their own data and information, but this likely involves the cus- tomer's staff and might not be easy. In that case, where there is extreme caution around IP, the soware/tool vendor would simply provide the solution, and that would be it.