Does my company need to start using the new revision of a standard?

Answered by IPC Vice President – International Relations, David Bergman
Originally posted 5/11/10

This entry was written by IPC, posted on May 11, 2010 at 2:48 pm, filed under Assembly, Printed Circuit Boards and tagged , , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

4 Comments

  1. David Miles
    Posted May 12, 2010 at 1:57 pm | Permalink

    With the new revisions of IPC-A-610E and J-STD-001E do IPC Specialist require re-certification if their certification on Rev D is still valid? Can our company state we are producing product to Rev E based on the Rev D certifications?

    Reply
    • Kim Sterling
      Posted May 13, 2010 at 6:01 pm | Permalink

      Hi David – Jack Crawford, our Director of Certification gave me this response:

      IPC Certification is not revision specific. An individual who has successfully completed a course has demonstrated their ability to find criteria in the standard. Someone certified using Revision D is still certified if their employer makes the decision to change to Revision E. It might be better for your company to state that you produce product to IPC-A-610. Don’t list the revision letter. You may have some customers that want Revision E but some other customers that haven’t made the change decision and still want to work to Revision D. IPC will continue to support Revision D as well as Revision E standards and training programs. Revision E training is projected for release by late summer.

      For additional information, please post again or send your question to certification@ipc.org. Thanks for asking.

      Kim Sterling, IPC

      Reply
      • Andy
        Posted January 25, 2011 at 9:40 am | Permalink

        Kim,

        Just one more question regarding the new standard revision (IPC-A-610E).
        Lets say we are company X that are subcontracting our assembly to company Y.

        In this case we need to define the acceptability criteria between the two organizations.
        The assembly we receive from our subcontractor Y is inspected against IPC-A-610E class 3 in our company X.

        Our Y subcontractor stated that they produce product to IPC-A-610 without specifying the standard revision (as per your replay above) but …
        – there are mandatory changes (IPC-A-610E Redline document with 203 pages) between revision D & E so the acceptability criteria should be clearly defined between both companies X & Y
        – as we know, the certification is not revision controlled but the standard is a revision controlled document and the changes are mandatory.

        QUESTION:
        Should the acceptability criteria be defined to the revision of the document (IPC-A-610E) as well?
        I am thinking by referring to the standard document only, we are open for gaps in the acceptability criteria, thereby causing more confusion than we really should.

        Best Regards,
        Andy

  2. Kim Sterling
    Posted January 27, 2011 at 9:44 pm | Permalink

    Hi Andy –

    This is included inside each IPC document. Hope it helps. If not, please ask.

    It is the position of IPC’s Technical Activities Executive Committee that the use and implementation of IPC publications is voluntary and is part of a relationship entered into by customer and supplier. When an IPC publication is updated and a new revision is published, it is the opinion of the TAEC that the use of the new revision as part of an existing relationship is not automatic unless required by the contract. The TAEC recommends the use of the latest revision. Adopted October 6, 1998

    Reply

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