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80 SMT Magazine • May 2017 by Stephen Las Marias I-CONNECT007 Oren Manor serves as the director of busi- ness development for Mentor Graphics Valor Division. His responsibilities include business ownership of Valor's engineering and pre-pro- duction tools as well as partnerships and OEM engagements. In this interview with SMT Maga- zine, Manor discusses the latest updates in their Open Manufacturing Language (OML) commu- nity, their case study regarding Phoenix Con- tact's implementation of their IoT solution in its facilities, and what's new in ODB++. Stephen Las Marias: Oren, please tell us briefly about Mentor Graphics and your role in the com- pany. Oren Manor: Mentor Graphics is a rather large company, doing everything from IC design to PCB layout, and cabling system design into manufacturing, which is the Valor division. I'm responsible for all our partnerships in the Valor Division, managing business development with our OEM partners, the machine vendors, and all other partnerships, whether it's for program- ming or for data connectivity. I've been involved with OML because it re- quires cooperation from the machine vendors. I've been involved heavily in trying to evange- lize and convince some of the machine vendors here that OML is the future and for the last 18 months, I've been promoting OML as a stan- dard for the industry. Las Marias: What challenges are you seeing here at IPC APEX EXPO? Manor: Getting the data is a challenge. Every- body has it. There are a lot of proprietary inter- faces here. If you walk through this floor, you will see hundreds of different proprietary in- terfaces where the protocols are different—one machine communicates to you via TCP/IP, one communicates over some kind of file-based protocol, or one has a database—and the data is different. I count in seconds, you count in min- utes; I don't give you this data, you give that the data—it's a mess. Mentor Graphics: Connecting the Manufacturing Environment INTERVIEW