Abstract: The proliferation of counterfeit and unapproved materials is now a recognised, industry-wide concern in electronics manufacturing. Counterfeit material supply often defeats inbound inspection processes and adds real cost as premium, critical components must be sourced directly from the original component manufacturer. The IPC-1782A external traceability standard extension was introduced to eliminate counterfeit materials from the electronics manufacturing supply chain by introducing accountability and responsibility at every stage. The standard advocates the use of distributed consensus combined with tamper-evident, uniquely identifiable labelling to ensure the genuine origin of materials is known, without doubt by all stakeholders. This presentation will focus on the use of Fibrecode, a low cost, highly secure, intrinsic unique identifier that enables the use of anonymous labelling and packaging to authenticate the provenance of materials as they move through an IPC-1782A compliant secure supply chain. Fibrecode uses machine vision to harness the random and unique characteristics of embedded fibres to give physical assets a digital identity that cannot be reproduced or counterfeited.

Bio: Mr. Craig is a machine vision software specialist with a proven track record spanning over 25 years of delivering enterprise software products for IP video, electronics assembly, telecoms and financial applications. For the last 10 years Craig has been working on delivering innovation around brand protection, supply chain integrity, anti-counterfeiting and provenance, and, as a co-founder and the CTO of Septillion he is responsible for conceiving and developing the patented machine vision algorithms for the Fibrecode physical asset authentication system. More recently, Craig has been active in distributed ledger and authentication technologies and has been contributing to the development of the IPC-1782A external traceability extension since 2018.