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May 2017 • SMT Magazine 87 country. You cannot do it with the same level of human intervention, as you're doing it in low- cost territories. As you're bringing manufacturing back from Asia over here, you're going to have to really au- tomate and use increasingly more sophisticated systems, robotics, data collection analytics, to manufacture in America with better quality, but also with less people involved in the process. I think we're going to see this developing very nicely, allowing companies to really look at the cost structure and saying, 'Okay, maybe we can really build this in the United States if we can be more efficient, use less people, be quicker from design to manufacturing, be closer to our cus- tomers and also closer to where we design prod- ucts and have less shipping costs and be easi- er for us to make revisions and design spins.' I think we're going to see this reshoring initiative drive automation. Las Marias: What's the next technology develop- ment at Mentor? Manor: I think the other thing to add is big data. We collect all the data; although that's nice, the value is in the applications. We see the value being mostly in material. The ability to be dynamic about material replenishment, know- ing how to send the material in time, managing the material, having the ability to be Lean in your material in the warehouse, kit just before you're going to use this, and to refrain from un- necessary changeovers and unnecessary kitting. The other thing is how to use all the data in an application. Unfortunately, you cannot go out there and buy a big data solution from the big guys like SAP HANA, Azure or HADOOP. There are a lot of solutions out there which are big data, but they're not tailored to the PCB as- sembly, and I think it will take any EMS or large OEM two to three years to customize that kind of system specifically for the PCB assembly area. Anybody who has a big data solution specifical- ly for PCB assembly, like the one we've been de- veloping for the last couple of years, is going to get some traction because people are going to want to do something with all of this data. We're going to be promoting our big data business analytics solution. This applies not only to data we collect, but also to data coming from other sources, so the customer can collect it from processes with his own IT equipment and push it into our solution. Some of it might come from our IoT box, some of it might come from third parties, but at the end of the day, this is a centralized, multi-site, enterprise-wide solu- tion that really gives the customer insight into manufacturing. Las Marias: Oren, can you talk about the develop- ments happening in ODB++? Manor: Sure. ODB++ was pioneered by Val- or about 15 years ago. When we started doing DFM checks, we didn't have good enough data to do that. We needed very accurate component shapes and we had to know where the compo- nents were so we could check whether things could really be built. Back then, everybody was sending Gerber data, which was just not intelli- gent enough. That's why we developed ODB++ as an intelligent data format stemming from de- sign, layout systems, and into manufacturing. Today, all of the layout systems out there, whether it's Cadence Allegro, Zuken, Mentor, Altium, they all export an ODB++ file which then can be sent to manufacturing, whether you're EMS or an OEM. It's a very intelligent file in the sense that it has all of the data inside, so the manufacturer can easily build the model and manufacture this PCB without asking a lot of questions. This is really a way to reduce a lot of innova- tions between manufacturing and design ques- tions, and making this design-to-manufactur- ing flow much more efficient and much lean- er. We've done a lot of additions into ODB++ " Back then, everybody was sending Gerber data, which was just not intelligent enough. " MENTOR GRAPHICS: CONNECTING THE MANUFACTURING ENVIRONMENT