IPC, NEMI team to standardize factory and supply chain communication

Citation

(2000), "IPC, NEMI team to standardize factory and supply chain communication", Soldering & Surface Mount Technology, Vol. 12 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ssmt.2000.21912aab.008

IPC, NEMI team to standardize factory and supply chain communication

IPC, NEMI team to standardize factory and supply chain communication

Keywords: IPC, Standards, Communication

IPC and the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative have announced their collaboration on a new suite of standards for communicating on the factory floor and throughout the supply chain.

Under the arrangement, IPC will publish two series of standards:

1. 1.

   IPC-2540, for factory floor communication; and

2. 2.

   IPC-2570, for supply chain communication.

Members of the NEMI Virtual Factory Information Interchange Project will collaborate with IPC to spearhead the work, which will follow the rules of the IPC standardization process.

The supply chain standards will aid OEMs, electronic manufacturing service providers and component suppliers in describing components and materials. The factory floor standards will standardize the language used by assembly placement and test equipment.

The new standards will be based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), which encodes data into a format that is both human and machine-readable, accommodating their use over the Worldwide Web. GenCAM, the industry standard for electronic data transfer, will be used to describe the printed circuit board.

Working titles for the factory floor communication standards are:

• •

  IPC-2541 - Genetic requirements for electronic manufacturing shopfloor equipment communication.

• •

  IPC-2546 - Sectional requirements for shop-floor electronic assembly equipment communication.

• •

  IPC-2547 - Sectional requirements for shop-floor electronic inspection and test equipment communication.

Working titles for the supply chain management standards are:

• •

  IPC-2571 - Genetic requirements for product definition exchange (PDX).

• •

  IPC-2572 - Sectional requirements for quoting data exchange (PDX).

• •

  IPC-2578 - Sectional requirements for bill of material data exchange (PDX).

"This is an ideal cooperative effort", said John Cartright of Intel, one of the leaders of the NEMI VFIIP. Alan Fraser of GenRAD, another NEMI member, confirmed that manufacturers of production equipment anxiously await the results. Added Joe Fazio of Agile Software, chairman of IPC-257l: "The PDX standard is critical for companies to leverage the Internet and collaborate on accurate, instantaneous product content information throughout the supply chain".

Dieter Bergman, LPC director of technology transfer, said, "Since GenCAM defines the product, these new standards are the next step to move product information intelligently into the infrastructure".

For more information, see the IPC GenCAM Web site (www.gencam.org), or the NEMI PDX site (www. pdxstandard.org), or contact Bergman (bergdi@ipc.org) or Jeanne Cooney at (coonje@ipc.org) at IPC.