Several years ago, the National Electronic Manufacturing Initiative (NEMI) brought together the standards developers, tool developers, CAD users and CAM users. The industry was not moving ahead in this area and was facing competing data transfer standards from IPC and Valor Corp. This group formed the foundation of the NEMI Convergence Project. Committees looked at the management and technical aspects of data transfer. Eventually, IPC undertook an ambitious project with these goals:

• Eliminate the use of Gerber & related old, non-intelligent formats for data exchange
• Unite IPC/NEMI/Valor behind a single industry standard for data exchange
• Make the new standard XML compliant
• Combine the best of ODB++(X) from Valor and GenCAMX from IPC
• Focus on providing solutions as well as standards
• Formalize the converged standard using ANSI procedures

IPC formed the 2-17 convergence subcommittee and achieved success in February 2004 with the release of version 1.0 under the chairmanship of Dana Korf, Sanmina, and Henry Jurgens, Celestica. IPC-2581 is available as a free download. The XML schema is also posted for those companies that are implementing the new converged structure.