Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/924542
58 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 can flow from machine to machine, no mat- ter whose machine it is. When they get that data, they can then apply their internal algo- rithms, their secret sauce, shall we call it, so we're not infringing upon what the manufac- turers are doing or what may make their piece of equipment special. It's just using that com- mon framework so we can transmit the data from machine to machine. As we gather infor- mation, like if you have a part and you must alter the placement slightly, we can seed that back upstream. You want this to be bidirec- tional data going back and forth, so we can learn from the shop floor and continually im- prove the manufacturing process. Las Marias: Is CFX a replacement for the IPC- 2541, or the CAMX, as you were mentioning earlier? Jaster: It's kind of a replacement, but it's two- fold. One, the industry has moved ahead. When you think about how this industry started and how we used to do drawings on big drafting tables, and then photographing it down to the size we really wanted, to where we are today with data. The whole technology has changed and we're taking advantage of those advanc- es. With the whole Internet of Things and In- dustry 4.0, people really want to start commu- nicating more about the data. In the past, it's really been one way. You just keep it flowing through the factory. But we know there are so many things we can learn from the process, and we want to take that information and flow it back, not only in the manufacturing process but to design. When I was in the development area, that was always a problem because we'd send it over to manufacturing and they may do some- thing or tweak that data partially, not change the design, but they might adapt the data a little bit for their shop floor. Then that meant that information didn't necessarily get back into the design community. So, being able to have bi-directional data is going to move us forward. Not only can the shop floor under- stand what's going on in their machines and maybe tweak things a little here or there, or if they know this design in the past has had a problem, to change something to adapt to it. They can also feed information back to the de- sign community as well because we've got this common set of terminology that we're using, so it'll be easy to transmit information back and forth. Las Marias: How is CFX going to address all that? Jaster: CFX is not related to any one tool. It is tool agnostic, so it is being done by the equip- ment manufacturers, the software vendors, and OEMs, all on the committee. We have a chair from each one of those areas to make sure that it's being looked at across the board, and that it's not one industry or one player trying to push their version of things. It is definitely a balanced committee with balanced leadership who are looking at this for the entire electron- ics industry. We have already agreed to a transport mech- anism, and it's the AMQP 1.0 message queu- ing protocol. The team looked at a number of transport mechanisms, and the team decid- ed that was the one that really had the most versatility and would serve us in the long run for this committee. Now, the next thing we're working on is standardizing the bits of infor- mation we need to share back and forth. But instead of doing it machine by machine, like if you're a surface mount machine or an oven, we're instead doing it by function. We know that with pretty much every machine, IPC APEX EXPO 2018 PRE-SHOW SPECIAL COVERAGE