In 2018, the Taiwan Printed Circuit Association (TPCA) began to assist the PCB industry to establish three major Smart Manufacturing Alliances, including the PCBA-Team for rigid boards, the PCBECI (Printed Circuit Board Equipment Communication Interface) Connected Equipment Demonstration Team for the machinery equipment end, and the Advanced Flexible PCB Smart Manufacturing Alliance. The PCBECI is used to connect the three major alliances to a unified communication protocol in order to accelerate the progress of smart manufacturing in the PCB industry. In 2019, the TPCA has regulated the Intelligentization Committee into an established organization and subsequently defined development for the smart manufacturing blueprint of Taiwan’s PCB industry. 

 

    Since 2018, the TPCA has constantly improved the PCB industry’s Smart Upgrade Program. To date, it has established a demonstration team for flexible and rigid boards, and equipment. It is hoped that under the leadership of the top manufacturers, other industry players might be encouraged to follow. So far, Unimicron Corp., Unitech Electronics, and Chin-Poon Industrial have taken the lead in joining the PCB A-Team project, and equipment makers C SUN, Tongtai Machine & Tool, and others have joined the PCBECI Connected Equipment Demonstration Team. Career Group has teamed up with the upstream supply chain Pomiran Metalization Research in the Advance Flexible PCB Smart Manufacturing Alliance. Also, Zhen Ding Technology, ASE Group, and other carrier board leaders are evaluating PCBECI with a view to introducing them into their new factories. The excellent performance of the leading manufacturers is expected to motivate more followers, expanding the market demand for PCBECI and attracting more equipment system vendors to invest in its development to reduce application costs.

 

    The TPCA has pointed out that the PCB industry’s smart manufacturing development blueprint framework is based on the foundation of its application level and development process to construct various smart manufacturing applications. In the application hierarchy, it will primarily begin with the three aspects of smart equipment, smart production, and smart operation.

 

    Based on these three application aspects, each structural application layer can be further divided into data acquisition and integration, the visualization of data presentation, data modeling and analysis transparency, data prediction, and the provision of adaptive support for decision making according to the application development process. Through the development of this blueprint, it can build the capabilities required for the various stages of PCB manufacturing. This purpose is to customize the construction ability for each stage of the PCB manufacturing process, thus achieving short-term production line visualization, mid-term production intelligence, and the benefits of long-term operational intelligence.

 

    The TPCA reached a consensus in 2015 to comply with the established SECS/GEM initiative of the semiconductor industry as a communication standard. After six meetings with experts, it simplified the PCBECI to abide by the PCB requirements and served as a unified format for collecting the production data for communication purposes. It was also hoped that the cost of the custom-made machine protocol of the equipment manufacturers would be lowered through the unified standards. (News source: DIGITIMES)