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ITRI ​​and Taiwan Printed Circuit Board Association (TPCA) launched the drafting and promotion of "Taiwan PCB Equipment Communication Protocol". At the initial stage, a consensus has been reached with the industry. Firstly, based on the promotion of communication protocol standards between devices, further integration of the Internet of Things, large Technologies such as data and cloud computing help Taiwan's circuit board industry continue to upgrade and consolidate Taiwan's dominant position in the global PCB industry.

At this stage, Taiwan PCB manufacturers' production line machines all use inconsistent communication interfaces, making data collection and uploading a challenge. Once there is a lack of data, the long-term goals of "smart manufacturing" cannot be achieved. Seeing such industrial needs, since 2015, the Taiwan Circuit Board Association and the Industrial Technology Research Institute have started to study the "Taiwan PCB Equipment Communication Protocol", hoping to establish a common standard for machine communication interfaces, which will not only help to establish PCB production line information The storage and analysis platform builds a production information system for the entire plant, and utilizes smart manufacturing benefits such as early warning diagnosis, real-time monitoring, machine-to-machine communication, and process simulation. Through data collection, connection, and analysis, factories and production lines can be transformed into autonomous perception , Operational knowledge-based organization, and further achieve the goal of intelligent production decision-making.

In order to assist the PCB industry to accelerate towards intelligence, and in line with the government's smart machinery and smart manufacturing industrialization policies, ITRI and the Taiwan Circuit Board Association (TPCA) launched the drafting and promotion of the "Taiwan PCB Equipment Communication Agreement". Hu Zhusheng, director of mechanical and electromechanical systems, said that with the transformation of technological products from standardized specifications to flexible and customized production forms, Taiwan's PCB industry must accelerate its move towards smart manufacturing in order to quickly meet the changing needs of customers.

Since the first step in achieving smart production is to integrate and link all production equipment, the key is to ensure unimpeded communication between the various equipment in order to further achieve the benefits of prediction, control, and compensation optimization. For this reason, Through the TPCA platform, Taiwan's circuit board industry has reached a consensus and decided to follow the Semiconductor Industry Communication Protocol (SCES) and extract part of the communication protocol applicable to PCB equipment to solve the long-term development needs of the PCB industry towards intelligence. Not only that, the future of PCB equipment In addition to promoting the communication protocol in China, it also plans to cooperate with SEMI-Semiconductor Association to make the PCB communication protocol an international standard.

In addition, the Taiwan Circuit Board Association (TPCA) and the Industrial Technology Research Institute have joined hands to devote themselves to promoting Taiwan's PCB equipment communication standards at home and abroad, assisting the industry to quickly improve smart manufacturing capabilities; with the PCB equipment communication agreement, for PCB factories, It will solve the problem that there are many types of communication languages ​​for many devices in PCB factories. Unifying the communication language can improve the efficiency of information collection, application and analysis; for equipment manufacturers, they only need to focus on the development of one communication technology to avoid customization for different customers. The communication format will increase the cost in vain.

Xu Zhenghong, the convener of the PCA Smart Manufacturing Alliance, said that Taiwan's circuit board industry ranks first in the world in terms of total output value and output in the global circuit board industry map. However, due to the great changes in the market competition and production environment, industrial upgrading cannot be delayed. Therefore, in the 2017 white paper recently released by TPCA, it was revealed that Taiwan’s circuit board (including materials and equipment) chain will challenge the trillion-dollar output value target in 2020, and Take high-value, intelligent and green production as the main axis of strategy. However, due to the complicated production lines in the PCB industry, the monitoring of each site has a great impact on the yield rate. If the intelligent automation technology can be gradually realized, it will not only improve the quality of manpower, but also reduce the scrap rate of materials and improve the quality yield rate. It can meet the flexible production demand of "small quantity and variety" of future products.