To precisely define all the details of PCB manufacturing and to ensure that the product is manufactured, tested, certified and shipped in full accordance with customer requirements, this process requires a lot of information. In this regard, the people most worried about things not composed of PCB design of image data, CAD/CAM interface has been mature, people can be widely accepted, but in the style required to submit orders need to deal with petty necessary information. When the information is expressed in different formats by different customers, the PCB industry needs to spend a lot of time and money interpreting and interpreting the information. If the information can be expressed in a unified "language", then everyone can save a lot of time, but also avoid the wrong interpretation of information.
Recently, an independent international working group developed a new, open, interchangeable printed circuit manufacturing data standard consisting of members from all sides of the supply chain. A glance at the CircuitData site, you can see the team have achieved what results: basically, it extends the existing CAD/CAM format or create new format is not feasible, the format is developed according to the specific needs, put a lot of extra information which is not incorporated into the layer of logical. And the PCB designer has no responsibility to enter the information.
The CircuitData team with attention and the exchange of data, such as physical information, circuit board board, insulation material and the conductor layer material, stacking structure, drilling and other mechanical processing, electroplating, welding layer, legend and finish machining, testing and so on, of course, including the standard requirements and conflict resolution procedures. In accordance with customer requirements, all relevant information relating to the implementation of cost effective and timely delivery is related to the project. The term is based on IPC-T-50 and the data output format is XML or JSON.
The project was originally launched by Elmatica company in Norway, the world's longest established PCB broker, with over 46 years of industry experience. The industry attaches great importance to accurate and efficient communication of PCB manufacturing information, especially in the defense, automotive, civil aviation and medical sectors.
Elmatica's technical director, Andreas Lydersen and senior technical consultant Jan Pedersen, is the head of the CircuitData project, and I'm happy to interview them.
Pete, Starkey:Andreas, Jan, thank you for accepting my interview. With regard to your data transfer language, I would like to know more about it, and I believe our readers of I-Connect007 are the same. I used to work at a fast moving PCB manufacturer, and I remember that the circuit design we received before is 4:1's hand recorded film and needs to be taken at the local studio for image reduction and step by step processing. The early CAD designs were exported to vector plotters, and then we received our information in the form of a 1:1 photo copy, usually accompanied by an engineering drawing and a customer specification. Customers don't want to give us digital information before, and even if we have our own CAM systems and laser plotters, they're still worried that we'll steal their designs. It took us a long time to convince them. Subsequently, we have witnessed the development of proprietary CAM and engineering software solutions, and they also have the auxiliary functions of pricing and reporting. Nowadays, there are many sophisticated systems on the market.
But after reading your article and visiting the CircuitData website, I am very impressed with what you want to achieve. I also noticed that, in the Elmatica company, your business is to provide Internet service between multiple suppliers and multiple customers, by virtue of your understanding of the market, you can take advantage of a neutral stance ideal chaired the forum and drive the whole industry to understand the use of a standard language for communication.
Jan Pedersen: when it comes to my background, people are always joking that I was born in the PCB factory! In 1960, my father started work in PCB near Oslo, Norway, and as a child, I was also involved in the industry. Before joining the Elmatica company, I worked in every department. In 1992 I entered the Elmatica, all the way from sales to auditing to all technical positions, and until now I have been a senior technical consultant.
Starkey: I also noticed that you are in charge of the two IPC working groups and have won the IPC new star award this year". Congratulations!
Andreas Lydersen: I've been working in Elmatica for six years, and I've been working more on computers. Very soon, I was surprised that so much data exchange was transmitted in PDF format, so I was going to do something to change that.
Here I would like to point out that we are not competing with other formats. We did receive a lot of feedback at first, but since there are already existing formats, why don't we? We prefer to use ODB++ or IPC-2581, but 90% of the information received is in Gerber format. Although we are located in the middle of the chain, but our main goal is to use a language can be all the information we have converted into machine readable format, so we need to give further pressure on the supply chain. This point must be made clear. We're not going to war with anyone"!
Starkey: as I understand, it's obvious that you want to be a mediator and import all the information from a variety of sources into a unified system to facilitate people and machines to read this information. As for the term, although you can use different ways to describe some things, only use the IPC-T-50 vocabulary that means if we don't speak the same language, at least we will use the same vocabulary.
Lydersen: even in IPC-T-50, there are many terms in the same technical aspect, and people will be confused if it is written in written form rather than in machine-readable form.
Starkey:Andreas, could you give us a quick explanation of the current situation?
Lydersen: all right. This project has been carried out for a period of time, but in 6. In the past 8 months did not become the official project. Let's start with all the information we have now. As middlemen, we spend a great deal of effort on understanding each order we receive, so as to select the most suitable supplier. We've calculated that every time we receive a product, we ask ourselves 108 questions. After we get these, we'll add the most common questions as engineering inquiries, and all the files that are pooled will be in Gerber format. We then make these spreadsheets and browse through the existing technical terminology definitions such as IPC-T-50 to determine if we have used the list of expressions that are not listed. Then we condense the content to the extent that we can give it to someone else. We went through the IPC groove, but they were focused on 2581, so we decided to make it open source. Since then, we have been debugging the language continuously so that it can output any of our existing information. Practice makes real knowledge - we must try it ourselves! Now, all the information we send will be available on the CircuitData. If we don't spend a little time studying it, we can't read it, but at least we're promoting and using it now.
Starkey: the language is called CircuitData?
Lydersen: yes. This language is compatible with two different standard formats: one is XML, which appears earlier, and many people know it. But what we prefer is a more innovative JSON format -- JavaScript Object Notation -- which we will extend to a less variant machine readable format. All the downloadable files we currently provide are in JSON format.
All we have to do now is to get support, get more people to this forum, communicate with companies of all sizes, and encourage people to take an active part in it. As far as I know, a lot of people are interested in this project.
In contrast, with IPC-2581, we receive about 10000 orders a year, and only a small percentage of them use IPC-2581. And this standard will be available in 2004.
Starkey: for a more unified understanding, now has a number of projects, such as GenCAM and IPC-2511, as well as the integration of ODB++ will eventually become the latest IPC-2581 Offspring -- all of which are Dieter Bergman was committed to the promotion of technology. What are the differences between these projects and yours?
Lydersen: I think the biggest difference between our format and the existing format is that the format is created by the designer, and that the entire supply chain needs to be able to receive the files. The information presented in our format is to aggregate the files and other files that are added after the designer to a new file. If we use it with some customers, it saves time and money. Adding it to the format was a shortcut to success, and we soon tasted the benefits. This is probably our current stage.
Pedersen: I can tell you an example. My job involves answering project inquiries. You can imagine that we will get different requirements from the factory, which are related to basic knowledge. Take outsourcing designers for example. He will design new products and make product specifications. Then give it to OEM, and then OEM will join the enterprise request, and then send it to EMS. EMS joined the panel imposition array requirements. It may also be a requirement for materials, tolerances, weldability, etc.. Then it spreads to people like us, and we may also add some requirements such as packing requirements. And then to PCB factory, in fact, a large part of the data information has been spread to china. They had an interpreter, a young interpreter or interpreter, sitting in the office, translating all the data into chinese. Then send the translated data to the engineer. Of course, some of the company's engineers recognize English, but this is not always the case. This means that the information the engineer gets is translated into Chinese. He will try to understand all of these documents and compare the PDF files with all the files of three or four companies. Then he saw a request that said he needed to use the gold dip while the other said he was using unleaded HASL. One reads the need for this kind of tolerance, and the other says it needs that kind of tolerance - it's a mess!
Then someone will send the engineering inquiries, some of them to us, some to EMS, and sometimes someone will send them directly to the PCB designer, and then we'll ask the answer. After that, the problem is solved. The problem is that the original designer did not change his product specifications at all. Every new product has new requirements - we call it "product" because we have finished engineering inquiries and started production. Maybe we shouldn't call it "product" until it becomes an acceptable PCB". Just this morning, I also questioned the stacked structure of PCB, which has been changing throughout the supply chain and is now beyond track.
So what we want to do is send the document to his company after the designer has written it. If they are also using the same digital file format (XML or JSON) prepared, if they want to make some changes, such as from the leaching of gold into lead HASL, increased tolerance and so on, we only need to send a file to EMS. If you want to add your own EMS on the panel array, or because the designers do not pay attention to the characteristics of some components that need extra mechanical tolerances, they can take these requirements into a file. Then this file will be sent to us, and if we have packaging requirements or tag requirements, we'll add them in and send the packets to the PCB factory.
Now, they no longer need interpreters to translate the data because the engineers are reading the Chinese language directly. For example, IPC-T-50 has detailed descriptions in both Chinese and English, and if you translate these descriptions into the past, you can clearly understand what the customer needs. That way we can avoid 50% of Engineering inquiries. The process is very fast and the beauty of it is that the product specifications will be uploaded to an online system after the end of the engineering enquiry, and the designer can see the latest product specifications immediately. That is to say, you need only one file and one way to understand it throughout the process. You can avoid a lot of problems, troubles, and misunderstandings because you no longer need to understand that three people describe the same thing in three different ways, or describe puzzling mechanical tolerances. These things will be modified throughout the process and will be updated before the file is sent to the PCB manufacturer. The rest of the problem is just about productivity. We can also compare the production capacity of different factories so that we can know immediately whether the factory can produce this kind of circuit board.
Lydersen: and it's pretty good - no one can tamper with the Gerber format, and the data is tampered with. Nobody wants to do that.
Starkey: the format of the image information can be Gerber, ODB++, or IPC-2581 - it's only part of the data set, and it's always in the original drawing format in the packet, right?
Lydersen: Yes, that's right. But we can continue to talk about security. Remember most of the communication in the supply chain is related to the quotation? Now the supply chain, the inquiry after the transaction rate of less than 20%, means that 80% of the inquiry is nothing. But Gerber files can still be sent to everyone, even confidential documents. Everyone can read the document, check the factory's production capacity, and then distribute the document further - including those classified documents. But with this language, you can send requests without sending Gerber files, and you can immediately generate price and delivery time information directly to the receiving end of the message. This means that the whole process saves a lot of time and cost, and it avoids a lot of exchange of confidential information. The potential of this technology is endless, and I believe it saves manpower and avoids the mistakes that can be caused by existing methods.
Pedersen: and, compared to the regular product specification, we can add a lot of information. For example, the minimum line width of a design is 0.1 mm, and the minimum spacing is 0.1 mm, but not with which layer you are on - not knowing whether the electroplated layer is electroplated or not plated. In CircuitData, we will refine the information to this extent, so the factory can see the width and spacing of the coating after receiving the specification of the product, which is larger than the layer without plating. Pete, you've been working in PCB manufacturing, and it's important to know how well line width and spacing match up with the copper layer thickness. That's what I get every day in engineering inquiries - they can't achieve the line width and spacing required on the coating, or they can't complete the solder resist on the 2 ounce copper layer. So if you specify the appropriate details, the factory does not need to read Gerber information to consider production capacity.
Lydersen: so you can save time and manpower, and do not have to ask suppliers who do not have the production capacity, can quickly solve the engineering information, because you don't need to translate the data, also do not need to deal with the problem of time. It's good for everyone.
Starkey: the case you submitted is very convincing. From the point of view of the PCB manufacturer, I appreciate this technique very much because it can describe a product accurately and without any misunderstanding. As far as I understand, you are ready to publish a beta beta version of CircuitData publicly. About what time?
Starkey: the case you submitted is very convincing. From the point of view of the PCB manufacturer, I appreciate this technique very much because it can describe a product accurately and without any misunderstanding. As far as I understand, you are ready to publish a beta beta version of CircuitData publicly. About what time?
Lydersen: our current version is 0.6, which we can do for ourselves at the moment. We need other parties to join this project so that we can reach version 1 and then go into production. We are happy to sponsor this project - we have invested a lot of time and money in opening forums. But right now, we need to work with other people to complete the project.
Pedersen: we do have a project timeline: we intend to release the 1 version in October this year, and plan to hold a pre release webinar in September 26th. We will give you a detailed description of the British, and will publish the news in the industry news. Next, we plan to have an online forum to further explore the project and make real-time improvements to it. We have a steering group meeting four times a year. We will hold at least one seminar or big meeting each year, and we will hold a webinar every time the product is upgraded. It is expected to be upgraded two times a year.
Lydersen: you can find useful articles, graphic elements and signs for you on the www.circuitdata.org website, above there is a GitHub link to the project, which contains all the source code and documentation project. We will continue to accept suggestions and continue to add new members to the steering group.
Starkey:Andreas, Jan, I've benefited a lot from this half hour talk, and it's interesting. Thank you for taking the time to bring me the latest information and share your valuable experience. I'll try my best to get the readers to know the information.