KEY NIST CONTRIBUTIONS RESULT IN DEPLOYMENT OF NEW E-COMMERCE STANDARDS SUPPORTING ELECTRONICS MANUFACTURING.

Standards resulting from NIST's technical and leadership contributions in support of electronics manufacturing recently have been deployed in industry, as evidenced at the IPC APEX trade show in San Diego in January. Four vendor booths participated in the demonstration of the IPC-2540 standards for factory equipment communications; the IPC certified the first commercial software product as being IPC-2511A (GenCAM) compliant; and the National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) released three Virtual Factory Information Interchange Project (VFIIP) draft standards (IPC-2571, 2576, 2578) to the ANSI standards process through the IPC. The IPC-2500 series of standards is being developed to enable e-commerce in the $20 billion U.S. printed circuit boards (PCB) and printed circuit assemblies (PCA) market.

NIST has been working with both IPC and NEMI on the development of the IPC-2500 standards. A NIST staff member co-leads the NEMI committee that initiated the factory floor and supply chain standards, and now oversees IPC standardization of the latter. Another NIST staff member is the co-chair of the IPC Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) committee. The DTS committee manages the development of the IPC 2500 standards.

The NEMI/IPC collaboration has created a pipeline for standards development. NEMI initiates a standards activity when a need is identified. A group is formed to research and test a protocol or data format. The results are then handed over to the DTS committee to manage the draft standard as it is moved by IPC through the ANSI standards process. IPC can also take the standards into the international arena through the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) publicly available specification (PAS) mechanism for creating standards. Additionally, NEMI plans to increase industry support for these standards by encouraging RosettaNet to incorporate their use in future Partner Interface Process Specifications (PIPs).

For additional information and copies of the standards, please visit http://www.gencam.org/. Additional explanatory information on the 257x series, collectively known as the Product Data eXchange (PDX) standards, can be found at http://www.fis.nemi.org/.