IPC-2581 Consortium: A Great Stride Forward
IPC-2581 consortium held a chat session yesterday on Printed Circuit University, which had been cordially supported and actively participated by professionals in the industry. So far, there were more than 1000 visitors to IPC-2581 Consortium Chat. The moderators, led by Gary Carter from Fujitsu, answered more than 20 questions during the one hour session. The most frequently asked questions were around why IPC-2581 and what could be improved by adopting IPC-2581. In answering these questions, Gary listed several benefits of adopting IPC-2581. First of all, IPC-2581 is truly an standard developed by an internationally recognized body IPC. Secondly, IPC-2581 could improve efficiency by eliminating data interpretation and documents to drive PCB fabrication, assembly and test operations. If you adopt IPC-2581, you will have improved support for drilled/routed content, improved embedded component support and improved support to net-list for manufacturing testability.
Although the moderators tried their best to answer all the questions submitted, the one hour time was still not long enough. It shows data transfer has been an area of high interest to the industry. In order to enable, facilitate and drive the use of IPC-2581 in the industry, all consortium members will be willing to respond to all concerns and questions that people might have with IPC-2581. So if you miss the IPC-2581 Chat session on Wednesday, don’t worry. You can contact us directly on our website www.ipc2581.com. Also, the consortium will be presenting a poster next week (February 28 – March 1) at IPC Apex Expo (San Diego, CA) and will have a booth there as well, where members can answer your questions about the new standard.
IPC-2581: Consortium Leads the Way in 2011
2011 has been another eventful year in the PCB industry. As with all industries, we have seen our share of good news and bad news, mergers and acquisition, product announcements, plant expansions and company closings. But for me, there was one announcement that stood head and shoulders above the rest fro news worthiness: the formation of the IPC-2581 Consortium.
The IPC-2581 Consortium's charter is simple: To accerlerate the adoption of IPC-2581 as an open, neutrally maintained global standard to encourage innovation, improve efficiency and reduce costs. The members of the consortium will openly support and promote the adoption and usage of IPC-2581 by enabling their products, offerings and services to import/ export/ consume IPC-2581.
Intercept Announces Support for IPC-2581
Intercept Technology Inc., a leader in PCB/Hybrid/RF electrical engineering applications, announced support for IPC-2581 today. It is the fourteenth company in the industry that officially announced support IPC-2581 and join IPC-2581 consortium.
“Intercept has always been a strong supporter of open data transfer, and continues to support such efforts with our commitment to provide the IPC-2581 file format. As one of the few vendors that still utilize open ASCII formats for all of its output files, the IPC-2581 will be added to Intercept’s suite of ASCII manufacturing output options within the next year. Intercept strongly supports vendor collaboration for the promotion of improved design and manufacture practices, and is pleased to be a part of the IPC-2581 Consortium.”
Major Major and Standard Standard
We ask for your bill of materials, Gerber and centroid files to assemble your PCBs. All those pieces of information are necessary to properly program our machines to place your parts. That’s pretty standard stuff, but did you know that when the Gerber format reference book was first published, Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, Russia was the “Soviet Union” and Voyager 1 was well inside the Solar System?
Use of the format has been going on even longer. Yeah. It’s been around a while. For some reason, it has been very difficult to get everyone to agree to and use a standard file format. Gerbers really don’t have enough information in them to do the job properly, but it is the standard. Hopefully not for too much longer. How many of you reading this were even born when Gerber was new?
Spirited discussion at PCB West ———— More companies join IPC-2581 Consortium
After successful panel discussion and booth display of IPC-2581 Consortium on PCB West on September 28th, more companies are joining the consortium to accelerate the use of IPC-2581 in the industry. The new members are Artwork Conversion Software, Inc and EasyLogix Software Development.
On October 1, 2011, Artwork Conversion Software announced in Santa Cruzthat that it is joining the IPC 2581 consortium and will develop an IPC2581 readerthat will bolt together with several of their translation engines used by electronicdesigners.
“Supporting IPC2581 will enable our board design users and our OEM partners to work with any type of intelligent board data files that their end users require of them.”
They also promised that the development of the 2581 parser will be completed in Q1 2012 and first translators using the IPC2581 front end will be available 30 days thereafter.
Read more: Spirited discussion at PCB West ———— More companies join IPC-2581 Consortium