Information flow is essential to efficient electronics manufacturing and standards are essential to information flow. One area of commerce that has lacked its own communication standards is the electronics manufacturing factory floor.

Information exchange between a system of electronic assembly equipment and higher-level applications has, in the past, used proprietary or borrowed standards.

The IPC-254X and IPC-255X series of standards address this issue by defining the messages needed for this information exchange. Just as “snail mail” and e-mail information exchanging requires standards for the envelope and transportation mechanisms – or messaging interface – so also do factory floor communications.

This standard describes a messaging interface that is based upon an architecture whereby a single logical middleware server (the Message Broker) exchanges messages among Clients in a Domain.

Clients may be electronics manufacturing equipment or software applications present in the domain. The Message Broker acts as an intelligent message router between these Clients, accomplishing both Point-to-Point and Publish/Subscribe communications. Figure 1 shows a computer-aided manufacturing XML (CAMX) Domain consisting of the Message Broker, Application Clients, and Equipment Clients.