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20 SMT Magazine • November 2015 lay of a week between the data collection and reporting, a lot of lost opportunity went by before issues could be understood and action taken. Any result of actions taken would also take at least a week to be seen. With continuous or dedicated lines running with a low product mix, this was for quite some time acceptable to most SMT-based assembly operations. The introduction of more automated data collection systems with Microsoft Office appli- cations to make charts and reports has progres- sively reduced the lead-time between data ac- quisition and utilization, bringing firstly daily reports, or shift reports, then hourly reports, and many systems more recently that are able to provide immediate reporting, delivering messages and reports on phones as well as live progress metrics on overhead progress displays. These mechanisms have actually been in place for some time, using complex software, though limited in scope. This limitation is not a result of the technology of data management or re- porting, but mainly as a result of the poor con- dition of data availability from SMT machines. Unlike other industries, standards have nev- er gained traction in SMT-based production. The semiconductor industry seized on GEM-SECS as a communication standard many years ago, which delivers accurate and timely event data based on a set of configured requirements. Al- though some key SMT vendors decided to sup- port it, notably Universal Instruments at the time, licensing costs caused other SMT machine vendors to look elsewhere. Panasonic had de- veloped an effective RS-232-based protocol that communicated key events, available from their earliest machines. Communication abilities from many SMT vendors came as a by-product of their own need for real-time diagnostic infor- mation because the machines have always oper- ated too fast to see what is going on with the naked eye. As a result, the interface mechanism, the methods and protocols for data flow through the interfaces, as well as the coding, content, and meaning of the data, were all different across the different vendors and even between different m odels of machines from the same vendor. The CAM-X protocol was launched as an at- tempt to bring standardization into SMT. The ac- ademic theory behind CAM-X initially appeared good because standard data could be transferred with a standard protocol over a standard interface to anyone at any time. The critical weakness was that the useful data from most SMT machine plat- forms beyond the superficial was already heavily customized and so could not be represented in the standardized representations offered by the CAM-X format, meaning that proprietary areas within CAM-X had to be included. CAM-X could never then represent the level of standardization to meet the expectation that had been set. The introduction of CAM-X was resisted by many SMT machine vendors on a commercial basis be - cause most likely it would reduce the competitive edge that many vendors felt they had by offering their proprietary interfaces and software to their customers, making it difficult for customers to switch or mix SMT platforms. Another critical lesson learned from CAM- X was the limitation found in the capacity of networks within a factory. The 100-Mbit Ether- net standard was still new at the time, which, though being the best speed available, was still a bottleneck where more than a few lines of ma- chines were connected, not including support- ing processes or manual stations. The CAM-X format, based on XML, which conceptually is similar to the Internet's HTML format, was ver- bose because all data was expressed essentially as descriptive text, needing about 10 times the transfer capacity than the same information esseNTIaL pIoNeer's survIvaL GuIDe THe SmT INTerNeT oF THINGS—bACK To bASICS " communication abilities from many sMT vendors came as a by-product of their own need for real-time diagnostic information because the machines have always operated too fast to see what is going on with the naked eye. "