The STEP-NC AP238 Standard
The STEP-NC AP238 standard is the result of a ten year international effort to replace the RS274D (ISO 6983) M and G code standard with a modern associative language that connects the CAD design data used to determine the machining requirements for an operation with the CAM process data that solves those requirements.
STEP-NC builds on the previous ten year effort to develop the STEP neutral data standard for CAD data, and uses the modern geometric constructs in that standard to define device independent tool paths, and CAM independent volume removal features.
Enabling e-Manufacturing for Mechanical Parts
STEP-NC allows manufacturing organizations to seamlessly share machining and measurement information between machines and over the Internet. The emerging STEP-NC technology is yielding process improvements including a 15% reduction in machining time. The automated measurement and compensation enabled by STEP-NC promises to yield parts that meet higher accuracy requirements for less cost. The integrated simulation and verification enabled by STEP-NC promises to guarantee that every part will be made correctly and that production will stop whenever cuts are about to be made that do not meets design requirements.Working Steps
STEP-NC changes the way that manufacturing is done by defining data as "working steps": a library of specific operations that might be performed on a CNC machine tool. In other words, it breaks down every machining operation into the steps required to perform the operation. In the past, CNC machine tools had to be programmed using G and M codes (from ISO 6983), which were instructions that only told the machine what moves to make, without any semantic content that referred to the part being processed. STEP-NC will make G and M codes obsolete.![](images/irb5partfin_small.jpg)