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The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) plug and play factory project
As published in (and reprinted with permission from)
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF COMPUTER INTEGRATED
MANUFACTURING, 2000, VOL. 13, NO. 3, 225-244
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) plug and
play factory project
A. Dugenske, A. Fraser, T. Nguyen and R. Voitus
Abstract. The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiatives (NEMI) plug and play Factory
Project addressed the issues of how to quickly integrate new pieces of electronics assembly
equipment into a shop floor line management system and how to manage the vast amounts of data
available in todays electronics manufacturing environment. The necessary technical
infrastructure was designed, developed, and demonstrated over a two-year period. New standards
activities for electronics manufacturing were initiated where existing standards were either non-
existent or insufficient to achieve the project goals.
1.
Background
The National Electronics Manufacturing Initiative is a US-based consortium of 55
electronics companies. The goal of the consortium is to increase the competitiveness of US
electronics manufacturers. NEMI develops five-year technology roadmaps and performs gap
analysis to identify critical needs of their original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and electronics
manufacturing service (EMS) members. New projects are initiated based on the results of the gap
analysis. The plug and play Factory project was started under the auspices of the Factory
Information Systems Technical Implementation Group in December 1997. The goal of the project
was to design, develop and demonstrate a technical infrastructure to enable the replacement of
both electronics assembly equipment and electronics assembly software in a fraction of the time
and at a fraction of the cost normally associated with those activities.
2.
Project Goals
The goals of the project were to reduce the amount of time and cost that is takes to
integrate a new piece of electronics assembly equipment into a shop floor environment and start
collecting data and controlling that equipment. It is estimated today that the integration cost of a
typical factory information system is up to four times the cost of purchasing that system in the
first place. Also, the possible two years that it typically takes to design and implement a new
factory floor system is much longer than the product technology life cycles of todays electronic
products. Often what happens after a long period of analysis, design and implementation is that
users declare It is just what I asked for, but not what I want. The reason for this is that the
business model has changed so drastically during the time it took to implement the factory
information system that the system is at best underutilized and at worst never used to support real
production. By demonstrating an order of magnitude reduction in the amount of time and the cost of
implementing a new factory information system on an actual electronics manufacturing line, the
the project achieved its goal of drastically reducing the break-even point for implementing a new
factory information system.
3.
Project Structure
The project was structured as a working group of 16 NEMI member companies and
organizations that each contributed both time and money to the project. Gaining the necessary
resource commitment as part of the entry fee for the project was critical to its success, as the
expertise and insight that was provided by the participating companies proved invaluable at
several critical points during the project. The following companies all participated in the project:
AMP, Celestica, Compaq, Delphi Delco, EDS, GenRad Inc., Georgia Institute of Technology,
Industrial Computer Corporation (ICC/GR Software), Intel, Lucent Technologies, National
Institute of Standards and Technology, Sandia National Labs, Solectron, Speedline, State
University of New York, Binghamton, and Universal Instruments Corporation.
Project meetings were held every two months and rotated through the different project
member sites. This strategy also proved very beneficial, as the project members were able to gain
wider visibility for the project in their respective companies while at the same time comparing
their own experiences to those of their peers at the other project member companies.
Key to the project also was the element of a testbed on which to test the ideas developed
by the other project teams. There were three project teams in all. The first team was the
Equipment Communication team which was led by Delphi Delco and Lucent. This team
developed the performance and cost requirements for the project. The second team was the
Framework Development team. This team was led by GenRad, Inc. and Universal Instruments
Corporation and was responsible for developing the technical infrastructure used on the project.
The third team was the Testbed team. This team was led by the Georgia Institute of Technology
and was responsible for testing the concepts developed by the Framework Development team and
determining if met the needs as specified by the Equipment Communications team. This feedback
mechanism between the requirements, design, and implementation teams served as a rapid
prototyping environment and helped the project focus its resources and kept it moving forward by
quickly either proving or disproving the technical feasibility of several different technical
approaches investigated during the project. The interaction between the Framework Definition
task and the Testbed task is shown in figure 1.
By making use of a testbed, it is felt that the standards development process can be
greatly accelerated. Early adopters of the standard can also approach the standard with lower risk
and at a lower cost, since many of the initial inconsistencies, incompatibilities and over-sights can
be found prior to the recommendations being released as a standard. Companies that make use of
the standard will have the confidence to adopt that standard knowing that the fundamental
technologies have been tested prior to their implementation. The testbed can also assist
organizations to adopt the standard by providing an initial reference implementation. The cost to
individual companies is also lower , since many participants share the initial rather than develop
something independently that may or may not become widely adopted at a later date. This is
especially true of many small to medium size companies that provide much of the software used
in electronics manufacturing, since their budgets are less likely to absorb repeated changes in
technology direction.
This technique is different from conventional standards development efforts in the sense
that recommendations are tested and fed back to the recommending body in a very short period of
time (months). When standards are developed without the use of a testbed or reference implementation, the recommending body doesn't receive feedback until an organization puts the
standards into practice, a process that can often take years.
Plug and Play
Framework
Definition
Plug and Play
Testbed
Figure 1. Plug and play project task interactions.
4.
NEMI plug and play factory project requirements
4.1
Motivation
More efficient SMT assembly operations, with increased equipment utilization and
reduced quality problems, are the primary reasons an OEM or EMS would consider
implementation of a line-wide monitoring application. While vendor-specific monitoring
packages have been available, such packages do not address the desire to install the best-suited
machines on a SMT line, regardless of the vendor. What is needed is a "plug and play"
environment, where equipment from multiple vendors can be installed and a generic interface
used to connect the equipment to a vendor-independent line monitoring host application.
Such a scenario has been successfully implemented in the semiconductor industry.
Process monitoring, equipment status and parameter tracking are critical to the rapid achievement
of profitable wafer yields. The wafer fabrication process, as much an art as a science, demands
close monitoring of each operational step. The Generic Model for Communicatio9ns and Control
of SEMI Equipment (GEM) interfacing standard enjoys broad vendor support in the
semiconductor industry and allows implementation of plug and play integration of multiple-
vendor equipment when configuring a production line. GEM builds on the Semiconductor
Equipment and Materials International (SEMI) organization SEMI Equipment Communications
Standard 2 (SECS-II) by defining the messages and behaviors of semiconductor manufacturing
equipment. Many surface mount equipment vendors have attempted to adopt the GEM/SECS-II
standards for their offerings but the efforts have not resulted in a true plug and play environment.
The NEMI p