The New MIL-STD-130N Standard as per the UID compliance

As per UID compliance, product identification marking is mandatory in the aerospace, automotive, and defence industries to identify and trace products in the manufacturing process. The US Department of Defence has set certain standards to ensure that these marks are strictly complied with and mandated as per the UID compliance.  One such standard is MIL-STD-130.  According to the MIL-STD-130 standard, contractors supplying military products are required to have an acquisition value greater than $5000 or any mission critical or serialized product component are mandated to mark their products with a specially formatted machine readable 2-D Data Matrix bar code.

The 2-D Data Matrix code ensures that products having this UID compliance code are validated, readable and formatted correctly. A Two-dimensional Data Matrix code usually contains a manufacturer serial number, identification number, and the serialized part number of the product.  These codes are placed on the manufacturing products in several ways such as dot peening, ink jet, laser etching or even through chemical etching. The 2-D Data Matrix prevents codes being misread and provides higher density of data storage. As this is an open architecture code, the encoding algorithms are freely available for all manufactures.

 However certain loopholes were observed in the MIL-STD-130 standard. For example, it was scrutinized that a flat laser-marked metallic part can be read easily by using on-axis illumination, but it could be a problem to verify other marks using the equivalent illumination. The problem was solved in the latest version of the standard, MIL-STD-130N. This new standard, approved for use by all Department and agencies of the Department of Defence (DoD) was released on December 17th, 2007. According to this new MIL-STD-130N standard, a number of different lighting methods are mandated to be used for quality checking of direct part marks. Defence contractors are also required to follow specific mark quality measures when delivering parts to the government.

Several lighting conditions and mark-quality measures are to be verified in the new MIL-STD-130N standard .Ten types of lighting using red 650 ±20-nm LEDs are specified as per the latest MIL-STD-130N standard. Besides this, the 2-D Data Matrix code must be verified according to the cell contrast, cell modulation, reference decode, print growth, unused error correction, minimum reflectance, axial non-uniformity, grid non-uniformity, fixed pattern damage, and cell size.

As per the UID compliance, here is a brief summary of some of the changes in the MIL-STD-130N standard.

According to changes in section 3, an item marked with the identification information of another item can be affixed to the other item. However, the label or nameplate which is affixed to a particular item can be of similar or different material than that of the item.

The changes in section 4 emphasizes that the UID compliance marking method ought to be permanent. As per the new MIL-STD-130N standard, the marking method should ensure to withstand the environmental changes and any specific rebuild processes. However, all existing marked products aren’t subjected to retest just because this MRI requirement clause is added now in the new standard. The retest can only require when insuring with the UID compliance with section 4.5.