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IPC APEX EXPO 2020 Attendees Speak: Tom Salmon
March 6, 2020 | I-Connect007 Editorial TeamEstimated reading time: 1 minute
Tom Salmon is VP of Collaborative Technology Platforms for SEMI and executive director of the Fab Owners Alliance
Nolan Johnson: What are your impressions of the show?
Tom Salmon: I’m impressed by what I’ve seen and the variety of solutions. Industry 4.0 is still a big thing here. I’m guessing just by the number of attendees that we took a little bit of a hit from the coronavirus. But most of the people I’ve talked to are happy with the meetings that they’re having with folks. Overall, it seems to be positive for everybody.
Johnson: What themes do you see?
Salmon: For us, it’s all about connectivity. We’re driving toward closed-loop communications within the facilities and on the manufacturing floor. That’s why we’re presenting with the SMT-ELS suite of standards. We had a user group meeting yesterday and were able to communicate out to a number of key users in the audience. Again, we’re just trying to show better connectivity. SMT-ELS is a great replacement for SMEMA. It’s a bolt-on application. You don’t have to buy new equipment; you can bolt-on DLCs, as well, to get that horizontal machine-to-machine communications.
Johnson: What customers are finding this particularly interesting?
Salmon: We had a mix of people. We got the message out as much as we can to the major EMS companies, but couple of the EMS companies from Asia were not able to send people because of the coronavirus. We ended up with a few ODMs, in addition to EMS companies, that very interested in machine-to-machine communications.
To read more attendee comments from IPC APEX EXPO 2020, visit Show & Tell Magazine.
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