Last year, Lockheed Martin was awarded a project by Chicago’s Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute (DMDII) to launch the PCB industry into the digital age. DMDII is a collaborative innovation center where manufacturers go to forge their digital futures. DMDII equips U.S. factories with the digital tools and expertise they need to begin building…
Category: Blogs
by Lucy Iantosca, Sierra Circuits The latest IPC Designers Council held at Cadence in San José, CA, was all about IPC-2581. Presented by IPC Consortium Chair Hemant Shah, the lunch meeting answered why IPC-2581 is the go-to standard. Similar to the Mentor Graphics-owned ODB++ in terms of functionality, it takes the lead over its competitor…
by Chris Shaw The evolution from Gerber to Industry 4.0 is well on its way. Fujitsu Network Communications, a telecommunications services and equipment supplier based in Richardson, TX, is a founding member of the IPC-2581 Consortium. We quickly saw the potential of IPC-2581 to not only streamline our existing fabrication and assembly processes, but to…
The IPC-2581 format was created in the early 2000s with the merger of two competing formats: ODB++ and GENCAM. The new format, the brainchild of the late Dieter Bergman, languished with no adoption until 2011, when a small group of companies created the IPC-2581 Consortium with the goal of getting this open, neutral and intelligent…
Produced by I-CONNECT007 in Cooperation with IPC, Jim and Bob talk about their involvement with IPC-2581 since 2011 and 2012 respectively as well as their participation in the Showcase (2581) demo. AXIOM Electronics is a contract manufacturer in the US and AEGIS is a software vendor that provides software for the PCB manufacturing companies. At…
Dear IPC 2-l6 Committee Member, Last year was a watershed year for the IPC-2581 standard. A broad cross-section of printed circuit board software suppliers, OEMs, equipment suppliers, manufacturers, and service suppliers, having implemented IPC-2581 both in trial and in production use, provided significant positive feedback to the IPC 2-16 committee regarding their experiences utilizing the standard to produce…
It was announced at the IPC-2581 Consortium Technical Committee Meeting on June 29th, that the Ballot process for the approval of “IPC-2581B Amendment 1” had met the requirements for approval with a more the 90% participant vote, all of which were in the affirmative. The ballot officially closed on July 6 whereby IPC-2581B Amendment 1…
The 2-16 Product Data Description (Laminar View) Subcommittee (IPC-2581) met in February during the IPC APEX Expo in San Diego CA. At this meeting final details for amendments and document updates as well as slight Schema modifications were addressed. The main focus of the meeting was to focus on an amendment of IPC-2581 Revision B…
Enhancements to the stackup and assembly data have the supply chain signing on to the electronics data transfer format. Eighteen months ago, Fujitsu Networks Communications CAD engineering manager Gary Carter shipped CAD files for a 12-layer PCB in the IPC-2581A format to a major board fabricator. The fabricator responded, asking for a drawing and profile information. It’s all there, Carter…
By Terry Costlow, IPC online editor The techniques used for moving printed board design data to manufacturing have many shortcomings, but the industry has never settled on a single approach for transferring data. Over the past couple of years, IPC and the IPC-2581 Consortium have teamed up in a concerted effort to change that. With…