Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/924542
60 PCB007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 and we basically said, 'No, stop it. IPC doesn't allow commercialization.' We don't want peo- ple pushing their own agendas when it's prod- uct specific or vendor specific. Some of that came up, and the wonderful thing is that a good, strong, solid team of people pushed back at the right points in time. I'm not say- ing it happened a lot. It really has been a very good group to work with. They're very in- terested. At first, there may have been a lit- tle skepticism. Could we really keep it gener- ic enough that everybody could use this? But when we came up with the building block ap- proach, people thought that was unique and a great idea, so let's go for it. Probably the big- gest problem we have in all of standards com- mittees is that they're made up of volunteers. Our volunteers have been great, a lot of them have given it plenty of time, but there just nev- er seems to be enough time. You always wish you had a little more time with folks where you could maybe get a little bit farther, a little bit faster. So, you're always limited by people's time that they can commit to a project. But let me reiterate, IPC has great volunteers. We are making great strides. We had our first meeting over in Germany at productron- ica. We've never done that before, but my col- league over there who runs some of the stan- dards meetings, Andreas Ojalil, ran that meet- ing for me. We have a lot of our committee members over there, so they're continuing to work it. People are excited because they see where this is going, and they see that this is going to be machine to machine, it's generic, and you don't have to use a particular mes- sage broker. You're not tied to any one compet- itor's tools. It's going to give you what we need without forcing you to do something you don't want to do. You're not giving away the secret sauce, which is critical. Las Marias: I think one big factor is the increas- ing trend towards Industry 4.0. This is a ver- sion of that when it comes to the factory floor in the electronics in the industry. Jaster: And that was part of it, too. When we started, we said we wanted it to address Indus- try 4.0, and everybody in that room said, 'Well, what's the definition of Industry 4.0? Because everybody's got a different definition.' That's one of the things that this team said, 'For this team's perspective, this is what we mean by Industry 4.0, this is our interpretation, and this how we're going to address it.' People agreed, so it may not fit some other models, but it's go- ing to work for the folks who the standard is intended for. Las Marias: What about the legacy systems that are being used by manufacturers or electronic assemblers? Do they have to install new sys- tems or equipment? Jaster: They won't have to install new equip- ment. This is intended to work with all existing equipment, and it will, because it's at a high enough level that it will work. When it real - ly is going to come into play is for the equip- ment manufacturers and the OEMs, and even the software providers. They now know if they work to this standard that it's going to be easi - er on implementation. With any standard, you don't have people going, 'Okay, we're going to cut it in tomorrow.' It doesn't happen that way. It's like with a software update in the CAD world. A CAD vendor comes along with an up- date for their program. A company will decide when they want to implement that. They may implement it on new designs, where you still have to have things around for old designs. IPC APEX EXPO 2018 PRE-SHOW SPECIAL COVERAGE