TECHNICAL ARTICLE
Originally Printed in the January 2005 Issue of SMT
Magazine
POINT: COUNTERPOINT
Industry experts voice differing opinions on full CAMX vs. proprietary solutions
CAMX
Standards-based Data Acquisition
Product tracking, performance analysis, quality analysis and
traceability rely on uniform and rich information from all factory
machines and data sources. The foundation to viable manufacturing
execution systems (MES) software is real-time data communications with
factory assets. True manufacturing transparency requires this final
connection to the process machines.
Traditionally, machine vendors provided data sources on their machines;
however, these were proprietary in content and varied from one vendor to
another. A more significant problem involved the scope and depth of this
data. Third-party suppliers were forced to build proprietary software
and hardware appendages to the machines to compensate for either the
inadequacies of the data sources on the machines or the inaccessibility
of this data.
Unfortunately, proprietary solutions have problems of cost, complexity,
openness and maintenance. Additionally, third-party vendor hardware adds
cost and complexity. Their proprietary nature made it difficult to
extend such solutions to an enterprise IT level. Maintenance becomes
difficult when the machine vendors upgrade their software because
proprietary solutions then break and require an upgrade. The industry
required something better, and the IPC stepped in.
The CAMX standards from the IPC solved these problems and opened the way
to fully open and standardized data access. Now, there is a
vendor-independent, process-wide solution using standardized formats
that extend to the depth required to deliver the solutions customers
demand.
The key to the CAMX data content standard, or IPC-254X, was multi-vendor
cooperation. CAMX offered a way for all machine vendors to provide an
industry-accepted solution. They contributed their knowledge of the
detailed data involved in their respective process areas such as test,
placement, printing, reflow, etc. This process added domain-specific
intelligence to CAMX that proprietary solutions from a single vendor
would have difficulty achieving. This collaboration also revealed all
the types of data vendors must support to meet customer demands. Once
all vendors agreed on the information required, they modified their
systems to one standard, and it eliminated the need for third-party
proprietary hardware additions to the machines. These core modifications
to the machine also produce deeper data than available from proprietary
appendages to the machines.
While the concept of standardization is fundamentally sound, it has no
value if not commercially viable and widely accepted. Fortunately, CAMX
meets these requirements. The rapid proliferation of CAMX data
acquisition via xLink already offers customers broad machine coverage
that expands monthly. Eighteen machine vendors, more than 30 machine
series and over 45 individual models are CAMX-enabled via xLink today.
IPC and the machine vendors who created CAMX have done a significant
service for the industry by eliminating the need for proprietary data
communications systems on machines. They provided an elegant answer to
the demand for total manufacturing transparency by making standardized
real-time data from machines readily available.
Author Information:
Jason Spera, Chief Executive Officer
Aegis Industrial Software Corporation
220 Gibraltar Road, Suite 100
Horsham, PA 19044