Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/929192
JANUARY 2018 I DESIGN007 MAGAZINE 65 Jaster: Right. You always have repairs, you always have legacy issues, and you have old machines on the factory floor. My guess is, as people bring in new equipment, they'll start using the standard. They'll see how easy it is to develop and use, as well as transmit data back and forth. The bi-directional ability is going to be great. Then they may take on proj- ects to update other programs on their floor, even for older equipment. It'll be easy enough to do moving forward, once they get used to using the new standard. Las Marias: Right now, you have the software toolkit from Aegis, which is the CFX messag- ing library, and then the transport mechanism AMQP 1.0. Are there any other new develop- ments with CFX? Jaster: Right now, we're working on those building blocks and defining what those build- ing blocks should be. The next step is getting those building blocks in place and getting the standard definitions there. Come APEX, we actually hope to be able to demonstrate on the show floor how simple and easy it is to use these building blocks to run the machines. I'm hoping we will have demonstrations there, but the key now is getting all those building blocks together and determining at what point we want to go ahead and actually publish the standard. It's just more work right now and getting those blocks built. Las Marias: Apart from the demo, what should the industry expect at APEX regarding CFX? designs. With factories and producing prod- ucts, even in the design community, most of our customers or our members are not con- sumer products. Consumer products you can do a lot of things and change over in a year, because you can change a whole product. In the defense industry, the automotive elec- tronics industry, we have a long-term approach to products because we must have long-term support. In telecommunications, my back- ground, we always had to support the old as you move to the new. I believe going to the CFX standard will be a phased approach., At some point in time people on the factory floor may want to start implementing CFX even with some of their older equipment, or older programs, etc. But because it's a standard, it should be easy and adaptable to do. Once we get the tool kit available, which Aegis has just graciously signed over to IPC, we're going to put it on a public website so that people can go in and start working with it. I haven't seen it yet, but I am told it's very easy to program in this new environment using the AMQP 1.0, and it's going to be very simple for folks to make modi - fications and update things. Obviously, every factory and every machine vendor will have to determine when they want to start implement - ing this. But again, that's the wonderful thing about it being at the 'what' level, and not at the 'how' level. It allows that flexibility. Now, what happens to the old standards? They're still going to be around. It'll take us a while before we say that we're not going to support them. We won't necessarily do any updates to them, but we don't necessarily say that you can't get the standard, because if somebody's currently using a particular stan- dard and they want to buy a copy of it again, we can do so. You can't necessarily just throw it out just because you got something new. You always have to look back and make sure you can deal with legacy products. Las Marias: That's true, because a lot of man- ufacturers have already invested millions in them. IPC APEX EXPO 2018 PRE-SHOW SPECIAL COVERAGE