A First Look at IPC-CFX Box for Legacy Equipment

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

Although the prevalence of IPC-CFX in the electronics manufacturing industry has increased since the standard’s launch in spring 2019, the committee responsible for the standard has recognized legacy equipment in the field as a significant barrier to widespread industry adoption.

To address this, an A-Team under the IPC-CFX Standard Task Group spent the past year working on a project that provides simple, readily available IPC-CFX hardware with supporting SDK that can act as an IPC-CFX endpoint for existing legacy equipment. The goal of this add-on is to provide an accelerated path forward for industry IPC-CFX implementation.

The A-Team demonstrated an early success of its work during live demonstrations of a Raspberry Pi-based IPC-CFX box at the IPC booth at IPC APEX EXPO 2023.

About the IPC-CFX Raspberry Pi Box Endpoint Project

IPC-CFX provides genuine plug and play IIoT data exchange between machines and supervisory systems across the whole shop floor. To realize the benefit of IPC-CFX, however, the whole production station value chain should be considered, as any missing link becomes a blind spot for even the most basic visibility and control.

The focus of this project is to define an IPC-CFX standards-based open-hardware interface, designed to enable existing machines that cannot natively support IPC-CFX through software alone to become part of an IPC-CFX communication infrastructure.

The A-Team’s demonstration showed potential IPC-CFX users that there is a practical and affordable option for providing IPC-CFX support at any desired IPC-CFX endpoints where natively supported IPC-CFX machines are not available.

To read this entire article, which appeared in the 2023 issue of Show & Tell, click here.