Aegis' relationships and collaboration with leading machine vendors propelled the development of a commercially viable data acquisition interface to assembly, test, inspection, and process equipment. The result of this collaboration was the xLink Transmitter. A technology adopted and in use by over18 machine vendors natively and compatible with hundreds more machines, making it the de facto standard for machine data acquisition in electronics assembly.

xLink is a sophisticated software service that makes any machine or data source a web service to which any system can subscribe to receive IPC CAMX data content. This data content supports solutions such as WIP tracking, alarm and performance monitoring, lot traceability, process measurement and inspection data, and test symptom acquisition.

XLINK ADAPTABILITY

• xLink is supported  by most  machine vendors as a standard means of CAMX data acquisition from their machines. Vendors such as Speedline, DEK, Assembleon, MYDATA, Universal, FUJI, Vitronics, EKRA, TYCO Electronics, VI Technology, Agilent, and SIEMENS are all adapted to and compatible with the technology. Several vendors ship xLink as standard equipment with their machines.

• All factories include some forms of proprietary data sources, particularly in functional test. For this reason, xLink includes an adapter architecture and Developers Toolkit. This tookit is used by Aegis or by customers to adapt proprietary data sources to CAMX and to utilize xLink to expose this data uniformly to the factory systems.

XLINK FAULT TOLERANCE

• xLink protects the factory from network dropouts. Even during total network failure, xLink stores and time-synchronizes event streams from machines and other data sources, sending the data to the factory systems when the network is restored with perfect sequential, time stamp, and content integrity.

• No single point of failure; xLink is a nodal technology, embedded on each data source or machine in the factory without need for a central broker. This provides lower cost, less layers from data source to presentation, and greatest availability and uptime.

XLINK FLEXIBILITY AND OPENESS

• xLink is an industry-standard web service and any developer can subscribe to it using modern developer tools and a knowledge of XML.

• xLink supports unlimited subscriptions simultaneously, enabling multiple business systems to subscribe to a single machine or data source for different purposes.