Industry News, Trends and Technology, and Standards Updates

The Industrial Transformation Asia Pacific (iTAP) Conference is taking place at the Singapore EXPO on 22-24 October, 2019. We invite you to visit the Cimetrix booth #1K21 in the Singapore Pavilion. Cimetrix and our partner Electrotek will be on hand to discuss your Smart Manufacturing needs. There are many industry terms that you may be wondering exactly how they apply to you. Whether it's "Who is Cimetrix?", or "What does Industry 4.0 mean for me?", we have answers to your questions! See the list of items below that we will be on hand to discuss. 

• Industry 4.0/Smart Factory
  • Basics
  • Terminology
  • Trends in I️ 4.0
• I4.o Applied to SMT Processes: Data with SEMI Standards
  • Explanation of SECS/GEM | SMT-ELS | And other SMT Standards
  • Six Sigma Black Belt Lessons
• Cimetrix Company Overview
• Cimetrix Sapience Smart Factory Platform
  • How our Platform Sapience, uses standards to provide data

Cimetrix® Sapience is an extensible platform used to connect varying factory equipment within a single event-driven framework. Sapience provides rapid-deployment tools for factories to mine the treasure trove of data available from shop floor equipment, driving actionable insights for optimal decision-making.  Manufacturers, OEMs and 3^rd-party developers use Sapience to gain access, through the web, to all kinds of factory equipment without having to understand the details of the myriad of shop-floor communications protocols. 

We hope to see you at our booth any time during the show, or you can schedule a meeting with us ahead of time by clicking the link below.

SEMICON West 2019 has come and gone! The annual trade show and technical conference was held this year at Moscone Center in San Francisco and turned out to be a very busy time for the Cimetrix team. The trade show lasted three days and filled two halls, including the newly renovated South Hall. We had many meetings with current clients, met with new potential clients and even made a few new friends along the way.

This year has been an interesting one, with the semiconductor capital equipment industry seeing a downturn. In January at ISS, the consensus was the trough for semiconductor capital equipment makers would be Q2 with growth returning in Q3 and Q4. Now, the consensus is the recovery in the chip memory market and manufacturing expansion may not happen until mid-2020. However, people also say the visibility is only for the next 3-6 months, so this could change. Many of our customers are affected by this downturn – the severity varying by their customer base and territory. Customers that are focused solely on semiconductor 300mm wafer fabs with a strong exposure to memory, have been hit the hardest with declines in revenue up to 50% from 2018 levels. Customers that have more diverse product lines and sell to semiconductor back-end or electronics markets are doing much better. While this downturn is affecting our customers to varying degrees, we had many executive meetings with virtually all of them expressing continued satisfaction and appreciation regarding the high quality of our products and technical support.

We also had two speakers at the Meet-the-Experts tech stage within the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion. Brian Rubow, Director of Solutions Engineering, spoke on how to get the most out of the GEM standard, including following what the standard says and fixing implementations using sound software practices. You can view his presentation here. Alan Weber, VP of New Product Innovations also spoke on Addressing Connectivity Challenges of Disparate Data Sources in Smart Manufacturing, addressing the road to the smart, digital and connected factory. You can view his presentation here.

Cimetrix continues to strengthen our relationship with SEMI by our global leadership and participation in SEMI standards meetings as well as our sponsorship of the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion. We sponsored a kiosk in the Pavilion where we connected our new Sapience platform for Smart Manufacturing to a BTU reflow oven, which generated quite a bit of excitement.

SEMI Standards meetings continue to be a priority for Cimetrix. We are well represented at the standards meetings by chairing/co-chairing various committees and attending/participating in others. The following are some of the areas of significance.

• The DDA task force continues to develop EDA Freeze 3 standards with adoption of cutting edge gRPC technology to improve performance.
• The Fab & Equipment Computer and Device Security (CDS) Task Force received approval for two SNARFs (Standards New Activity Report Form) - "SNARF: Specification for Application Whitelisting" and "SNARF: Malware Free Equipment Integration". The SNARFs were created by the CDS task force and approved by the Information and Controls global technical committee which Brian co-chairs.
• The North American Information & Control Committee at SEMI established a new task force Advanced Backend Factory Integration (ABFI) to define and update standards to meet the needs of the semiconductor backend industry. Brian Rubow from Cimetrix, Dave Huntley from PDF Solutions are two of the task force co-leaders.

During the SEMICON West show, an article was published, written by Cimetrix VP and GM, Smart Factory Solutions Ranjan Chatterjee and Dan Gamota, VP, Manufacturing technology and Innovation for Jabil. The article called “Smart Manufacturing Roadmap: Data Flow Considerations for the Electronics Manufacturing Industry” can be found here. This article identifies technology gaps and needs, and offers recommendations to guide the electronics manufacturing industry in realizing the benefits of smart manufacturing and is sponsored by iNEMI. Mr. Chatterjee and Mr. Gamota are co-chairs of the new smart manufacturing chapter of iNEMI.

The Cimetrix team was excited to once again be an exhibitor and sponsor of the SEMICON West show. This is always a great show and we were very pleased to attend once again. We are already looking forward to SEMICON West 2020!

To view the presentations from SEMICON West, and many more, click on the button below.

SEMICON West is almost here and we’re excited to once again be participating this year as both an exhibitor and as a sponsor of the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion! Visit us any time at our booth 1644 in the South Hall, at our kiosk (#1364) in the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion, or at the Meet the Experts Theater which will feature Cimetrix speakers on Tuesday and Wednesday.

SEMICON West will once again be held in the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, USA from July 9-11. The theme this year is “Insight, Innovations & Intelligence: Our industry – and the world – is moving beyond smart.” We couldn’t be more excited about the momentum of the semiconductor industry. As Industry 4.0 and the demand for Smart Manufacturing solutions have become more prevalent, we’ve seen our market expand beyond the equipment manufacturers to encompass all phases of the electronics manufacturing process and corresponding elements of the supply chain. To achieve a smart, connected factory, you must first have equipment that can communicate effectively, which is where Cimetrix has always excelled. Our well-known and award-winning products enable every semiconductor manufacturer in the world to connect their equipment to the factory information and control systems. SEMICON West has always been an important event for meeting with current clients, making new contacts, collaborating in the SEMI Standards community, and developing relationships with thought leaders across the manufacturing spectrum.

The rapid and continuous growth of manufacturing data is now driving demand for new analysis technologies that can further leverage its value. The Smart Manufacturing Pavilion is a great place to see some of the breakthroughs that are creating smarter processes and spurring innovation across the industry.  The pavilion once again includes a Meet the Experts Theater, and Cimetrix has two opportunities to address the audience. Brian Rubow, Director of Solutions Engineering, will speak on “Getting the Most from the GEM Standard” on Tuesday July 9 from 1:30 – 2:00 pm. Alan Weber, VP of New Product Innovation, will talk about “Addressing the Connectivity Challenges of Disparate Data Sources in Smart Manufacturing” on Wednesday July 10 from 3-3:30 pm.  

The Smart Manufacturing Pavilion and its Meet the Experts Theater are in the South Hall and we hope to see you there! Or, as always, you can visit our booth 1644 any time during the show.

Cimetrix attended the recent JISSO PROTEC exhibition (June 5-7, 2019) at the Tokyo Big Sight International Exhibition Center to see the latest developments in SMT (Surface Mount Technology) manufacturing… and witnessed a truly compelling demonstration of the new SEMI Flow Manufacturing communications standards in action.

The new suite of standards is named SMT-ELS (Surface Mount Technology-Equipment Link Standards), and includes SEMI A1/1.1 as a lower-level messaging standard with SEMI A2 SMASH (Surface Mount Assembler Smart Hookup) defining the content of the messages required to configure an SMT manufacturing line and automate the material and information transfer among all equipment in that line. This is depicted in the figure below.

The demonstration itself included placement equipment from 4 large equipment suppliers—Fuji, JUKI, Panasonic, and Yamaha—as well as load/unload stations and a bar code reader at the beginning of the line (see picture below). Each of these companies had implemented the “horizontal” (machine-to-machine) communications according to the SMT-ELS standards. The demonstration consisted of an operator scanning one of the stack of input boards with the barcode reader, placing it on the loader conveyor, and then watching as each piece of equipment automatically adjusted its internal conveyor to accept the board, run through its part placement recipe, and pass the board to the next equipment in the line, finally arriving at the unload station conveyor after a minute or so.

Before a fully automated multi-vendor production SMT line can be implemented, more work on the standards is necessary, especially in the area of error handling and recovery. In addition, the suppliers of other (non-placement) equipment types must adopt this approach. However, given the factory benefit of mixing equipment from multiple suppliers to optimize line performance for a specific set of products, this is only a matter of time.

If you want to know more about the status and outlook of these standards, and how they can be implemented in your equipment or factory, please contact us.

Cimetrix just finished exhibiting at SEMICON Southeast Asia for the first time. And a grand entrance it was. Located in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, this is one of the regional SEMICON shows put on by SEMI, a global industry association serving the manufacturing supply chain for the electronics industry. Southeast Asia is a hotbed for semiconductor backend and PCBA (SMT) industries. With our new employee Raymund Yeoh located in Penang, Malaysia; combined with our distribution partner Electrotek based out of Singapore, Cimetrix now has a strong presence to support Industry 4.0 adoption in Southeast Asia. 

By working closely with SEMI, Cimetrix had a new booth in the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Pavilion and an impressive demonstration in the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Journey.

Our new booth emphasized (1) our global reach as the world’s largest supplier of equipment connectivity and control software, (2) our new Sapience^TM factory side platform which has beta installations at select major EMS and electronics manufacturing sites, and (3) our new EquipmentTest^TM connectivity tester designed to make equipment connectivity easier than ever before.

Our booth was extremely busy the whole time with demonstrations of Sapience and EquipmentTest. We gave out vouchers for free copies of EquipmentTest to booth visitors which generated excitement and will increase learning for GEM connectivity in Southeast Asia. It was interesting to see the number of factory engineers and managers who visited us seeking help with getting their equipment connected for traceability and OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness). And we had the answers. Right next door to our booth was the SEMI Smart Manufacturing Journey which had guided tours demonstrating the use of Industry 4.0 throughout the electronics manufacturing supply chain. Our job was to demonstrate data collection using standards from live equipment in real time displaying OEE charts and data for each tour to witness. Setting this up can take months in a factory. Our Smart Factory Business Team is out to turn this problem upside down. They connected to all 4 live equipment in one day and were ready to go at the start of the show. And we are ready to do that in factories too. 

Here is Mike and Jesse giving a demonstration to a tour group. The equipment is located right behind the crowd for all to see; with Sapience displaying data and the crowd taking pictures. SEMI did a great job organizing this. We had top government officials, factories, equipment manufacturers, electronics distributors and universities come through the tours. We also exceeded expectations by adding artificial intelligence to the demonstration. Amazon Alexa was integrated into Sapience which allowed us to ask Alexa which factory was most productive last week. Alexa and Sapience analyzed the data and gave the answer to the tour crowd.

We have many new opportunities to follow up; and we will be working with SEMI on how to help companies in Southeast Asia learn and adopt Industry 4.0.

Following the show, our team spread out to visit the rapidly growing Cimetrix customer base in Penang, Korea, India and China with support from our local teams. See you next year in SEMICON Southeast Asia!

Cimetrix team members from around the world gathered in Japan for our annual Global Sales Meeting. The entire Cimetrix sales team was in attendance, as well as all of our Asian based Solutions Engineering team members, representatives from product management and our Smart Factory Business unit. The meetings were held at our new Cimetrix Japan office located in Yokohama, outside of Tokyo. Our hosts from Cimetrix Japan made sure everyone’s time in Japan was very comfortable and the cherry blossoms were still in bloom. We also took advantage to visit key customers in Korea and Japan both before and after the sales meeting.

The sales meetings included updates on the Company’s long term strategy and product roadmaps. Team members reviewed local trends in their regions, which included North America, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China and Southeast Asia. In addition, team members reviewed the record number of new customers gained over the past several years, customer trends and plans to ensure customer satisfaction.

Everyone was in agreement the Cimetrix strategy to open local offices with sales and technical support has been working very well as customers greatly appreciate dealing with local people that share the same language and culture. As the leading provider of software solutions for equipment connectivity and control in the smart factory, this strategy allows Cimetrix to provide the highest levels of passionate customer support to ensure our customer’s success, as well as develop direct relationships with major customers to help drive product roadmaps.

In the past, many companies in Asia used competitive solutions from small regional suppliers. However, now that most companies do business worldwide, they prefer to deal with a larger company that is truly global and an expert not only in their native country, but everywhere their products are sold. Cimetrix is uniquely positioned to fill these needs.

It was very exciting to see the great team members that have joined Cimetrix and are working hard for our success around the world!

To contact us around the globe, visit our Contact page and select your local office.

SEMICON Southeast Asia is coming up at the Malaysia International Trade and Exhibition Centre (MITEC) in Kuala Lumpur on May 7-9. Cimetrix is exhibiting at the show this year for the first time ever! In addition, we are pleased to announce our sponsorship of the new SMART Manufacturing Journey at the Global Pavilion. If you are attending SEMICON Southeast Asia this year, please stop by to see us at our Booth (#528) or meet with our team in the Pavilion.

SEMICON Southeast Asia has become an important exposition for the electronics industry in Southeast Asia, so we are excited to be exhibiting. In the booth you can see all of our connectivity and control products in action. A few short steps away is the Smart Manufacturing Journey, where you can hear one of our industry experts speak at the Smart Manufacturing Pavilion. 

In particular, Ranjan Chatterjee, VP & GM Smart Factory Business at Cimetrix, will share his thoughts on the "Consolidation of the Electronics Supply Chain and its Impact on a Data-driven Deployment Strategy for Smart Manufacturing" at the Technology Innovation - Smart Manufacturing & Smart Data Forum at 3:50pm on Tuesday, 07 May. 

If you'd like to schedule an appointment, please fill out our events meeting form by clicking below. Otherwise, we hope you'll drop by and see us during the show!

Our 2019 has started with a bang! First with CES (Consumer Electronics Show) at the beginning of January, rapidly followed by APEX at the end of the same month. What intrigues me is that the ingredient technologies promoted as essential to the success of autonomous driving, smart homes and smart cities at CES, are exactly the same as those discussed as enablers for smart manufacturing at APEX. The drive for Industry 4.0, like the drive for the digital transformation of our lives, will be built on connectivity, on data and, of course, on the actionable intelligence that is derived from that data.

At APEX, I spent a lot of my time listening to speakers, talking to our customers and prospects and sharing my own ideas with industry luminaries on panels. The story is extremely consistent. The fundamental need in the short term is to get everything in the factory, and in fact throughout the entire manufacturing ecosystem, connected and digitized. What is less consistent is the approach to doing that, with many making a simple process much more complex than it needs to be.One element which, to my mind, is creating unnecessary inertia, is the debate around standards. Within the industry there is considerable debate around the new standards. Whilst some great work has been done, and in many ways it is a fine example of how IPC can bring the industry together, the whole debate has made a simple task more complex than needed. Many users are asking which standard to use, do I need one or multiple, what machines connect to which standard and when will all the new standards be available everywhere?

Yes, the new standards could be good, but it certainly isn’t the only good standard, and it will take a long time to develop, debug, adopt and implement. The suppliers in the industry along with a few MES providers are quite animated about the new standards, but the EMS companies and OEMs making product as well as the PCB fabricators, and of course the semiconductor industry, are less excited. Many of them have existing communications standards like GEM, ELS, etc., that work perfectly well. Others have legacy machines that would need additional hardware and software to connect to new standards, but have some existing and functioning communications protocol.

The truth is connectivity should be simpler, and it can be. The semiconductor industry has been through this entire experience over the last two decades and many companies have successfully connected thousands of machines from hundreds of vendors in dozens of facilities in many countries. At Cimetrix, we have been working with them and have been delivering simple, scalable, economic connectivity solutions as well as the layers of analysis and intelligence that are built on top of that.

My advice to anyone starting their smart factory journey is to get the digitization and connectivity done and move onto building the digital building blocks of analytics and intelligence as well as value as quickly as possible. The inertia caused by worrying about standards is counter-productive and could cause companies to be left behind. They could also remain in the Proof-of-Concept purgatory forever.

One of the pleasing things about the debates and discussions related to smart factory at APEX is the willingness of vendors to collaborate. Most, if not all, recognize that smart factory solutions won’t come from a single vendor. Machine makers are also realizing that their deep domain knowledge combined with data manipulation only delivers part of the value and the way that data is shared on the line and beyond is where additional performance benefits can be found. There are now dozens of partnerships between the machines that collect data and those that use data, some in a closed loop but more recently in a manner that makes data available to whoever can derive value from it. These open communications and data formats will deliver real value in the future and make smart manufacturing a reality across the whole supply chain, from sand to phone.

There is a universal awareness that this digitization will drive a huge growth in data volumes. Many see cloud and hybrid cloud solutions as an important part of the data storage mix. Huge amounts of data also need manipulation and vendors are betting on AI (Artificial Intelligence) to help manage the data and derive real value.

It’s fascinating to see the ingredient technologies of the smart cities, smart homes and smart living, finding their way into smart factories and it will be exciting to see how the PCB and SMT industries utilize these huge leaps in progress driven by the consumer electronics world.

(This post first ran on EMSnow.com on February 14, 2019.)

Thank you for the trust and confidence you continue to place in Cimetrix. 2018 was an exciting year as we made great progress executing our strategy for long-term profitable growth. Cimetrix posted another year of strong growth as total 2018 revenues increased over 20% year-over-year. Since going private in 2015, Cimetrix has grown at a 20% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). In addition, Cimetrix posted its 9th consecutive year of profitability, which allowed us to further strengthen our cash position and balance sheet. Having no debt and a strong balance sheet gives us the ability to execute our longer-term growth initiatives and withstand short-term market disruptions.

Cimetrix is focused on enabling Smart Manufacturing in the semiconductor and electronics industries. We provide software to make the world’s most sophisticated and expensive semiconductor and electronics manufacturing equipment, as well as factories smarter. The Cimetrix strategy for long-term profitable growth includes:

1. Build great products 
2. Provide excellent technical support
3. Serve global markets
4. Create innovative new platforms 

Some of the 2018 highlights in each of these areas were:

Build Great Products

Cimetrix products are deployed in every semiconductor 300mm manufacturing facility in the world, as well as many leading electronics manufacturing factories. Both equipment makers and factory users have come to rely on the quality and reliability of Cimetrix software to run flawlessly in continuous 24/7 production environments.

During 2018, Cimetrix made continual improvements to all of its products that support the SEMI Standards (GEM, GEM300 and EDA) for equipment connectivity. The Cimetrix connectivity product family supporting these standards includes CIMConnect, CIM300, CIMPortal Plus, HostConnect, HostDeveloper and EDAConnect. With Cimetrix connectivity products operating in hundreds of thousands of installations in factories worldwide, our goal is to keep these products free of all defects. This allows us to respond quickly to new issues or opportunities during the year, which in turn allows our customers to confidently build quality applications. In addition, Cimetrix added support for new factory requirements and implemented several new features that make it easier for our customers to diagnose problems and debug new applications. Finally, we made changes to improve performance and reduce memory usage, which allows our customers to better handle ever-increasing amounts of data.

Cimetrix also developed a major new version of its award-winning CIMConnect product, which is used by equipment makers to meet their factory automation connectivity requirements. Over 100 equipment suppliers worldwide rely on CIMConnect for GEM connectivity. The new version of CIMConnect has been updated to better serve customers using the latest Microsoft .NET environments, supports multiple GEM connections as well as the use of other connectivity protocols.

Cimetrix also made significant investments in its CIMControlFramework product, which is a software platform for equipment makers who want a full software control solution with built-in factory connectivity. Cimetrix refreshed and enhanced many of the user interface screens to improve both look-and-feel and overall usability. In addition, we enhanced the device interface components to simplify the process of interfacing to third-party hardware and I/O, and increased our library of ready-to-use interfaces to support more hardware. During 2018, CIMControlFramework was our best-selling product for new customers.

Provide Excellent Technical Support

We improved our capabilities to better serve our customers by transitioning our Client Training and Support team into a new Solutions Engineering group. This reflects a change in emphasis from the traditional “product training and support” function to a more proactive solutions engineering approach that features a collaborative process for architecting solutions that best solve our customers’ problems. Additionally, the Solutions Engineering group continues to expand in response to growing global customer demand. We were very pleased to add highly experienced local engineers and partners in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia during 2018 who are working hard every day to ensure our many new customers are successful.

Serve Global Markets

Cimetrix further established itself as the worldwide market leader for standards-based equipment control and connectivity software for the semiconductor and electronics industries. The best evidence of our market leadership position is the number of customers that chose Cimetrix as their platform of choice for their equipment or factory. In 2018, Cimetrix achieved 49 “design wins” from customers worldwide, including 37 design wins from new customers. This represents a 60% increase in design wins from the prior year and set another new record for the Company. Particularly gratifying, the design wins include several customers that converted from products previously purchased from competitors, which means they walked away from prior investments to switch to Cimetrix.

While the primary source of Cimetrix revenue comes from equipment makers, Cimetrix receives a growing percentage of its revenue from factories. In addition, since Cimetrix software is instrumental in helping factories connect to smart equipment, Cimetrix is very active working with leading semiconductor and electronics manufacturers and their associated industry standards organizations on Smart Manufacturing initiatives. During 2018, Cimetrix team members chaired committees, gave presentations and engaged in events with industry thought leaders on Smart Manufacturing initiatives in Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, San Jose, China, Germany, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. 

Create Innovative New Platforms

As Cimetrix has grown over the past several years, we significantly increased our investments in R&D, which we are using to create innovative and exciting new cloud, mobile and AI-enabled platforms to fuel our strategy for long-term profitable growth by assisting our customers in their digital transformation. Our new platforms will enable our customers and partners to take advantage of the phenomenal rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity as well as the emergence of analytics and business-intelligence capabilities.

Going Forward

2018 was a record year for Cimetrix in both revenues and winning new customers. We now have the exciting challenge of providing our exceptional customer service to the many new customers who have entrusted Cimetrix with their business and to ensure they are successful. Fortunately, we have also expanded our Cimetrix team with some highly experienced, passionate and dedicated new employees. 

We remain very bullish on the longer-term outlook for Smart Manufacturing and Cimetrix. However, with all of the uncertainty in the world, we undoubtedly face risks of potential headwinds in the market that could impact short-term results. We will continue to work hard to respond to any challenges that may arise while we execute our strategy for long-term profitable growth.

From all of us at Cimetrix, we thank our customers, partners and shareholders for the faith and confidence they have placed in our products and our team. We will continue to strive for excellence in satisfying our worldwide base of customers and delighting them with innovative new products.

Sincerely,

Bob Reback
President and Chief Executive Office

Michael Lee of Cimetrix Taiwan talks about the upcoming TPCA show. Read now in Chinese or below in English.

TPCA（台灣印刷電路板協會）2018展會即將到來，我們很高興能連續第二年參展！該展將於10月24日至26日在台北南港展覽中心舉行。 TPCA展會旨在實現智能製造，因為印刷電路板行業與上游和下游的價值鏈相連。預計今年展會將有400多家參展商。

TPCA展會匯集了PCB製造商，SMT設備製造商和測試人員，綠色環境設備和材料製造行業，熱模塊相關設備，包裝和表面處理。

Cimetrix很高興參與此次展會，我們將討論我們用於智能製造的創新軟件產品如何幫助設備製造商和工廠。

歡迎光臨我們的I-226展台，或隨時在我們的活動網頁上預約會議！

The TPCA (Taiwan Printed Circuit Board Association) 2018 show is almost here and Cimetrix is excited to be exhibiting for the second year in a row! The show will be held at the Taipei Nangang Exhibition Center from October 24-26. One key theme of this year's TPCA show is the realization of Smart Manufacturing as the printed circuit board industry connects members of its value chain both upstream and downstream. More than 400 exhibitors are expected to be at the show this year.

The TPCA show brings together PCB manufacturers, SMT manufacturing and test equipment suppliers, Green environment equipment and material manufacturing industries, and suppliers of thermal-modules packaging and surface finishing equipment. 

Cimetrix is excited to be a part of this show, where we discuss how our innovative software products for Smart Manufacturing can help both the equipment suppliers and the PCB manufacturing companies

Come visit us at booth I-226 and/or request a meeting any time on our Events page!