Wednesday, March 29th 2023
U.S. President Invokes Defense Production Act for PCB Production
On Monday 27 March U.S. President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act in order to form a budget of $50 million, to be spent on domestic and Canadian production of printed circuit boards (aka PCBs). This move was deemed as important to matters of national defense, and technology has been cited as key part of North American security efforts. In a memo issued that day, Biden stated that without presidential action under the act: "United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for the needed industrial resource, material, or critical technology item in a timely manner."
PCBs form the basis of vital components that are integrated into military-purpose missiles and radars, in addition to electronics utilized for energy distribution and the nation's healthcare. The President continues to outline the importance of the Defense Production Act: "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."
He signs off with this conclusion: "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability." USA Industrial Groups have been requesting such a move to be made by Washington, going back to last year, when they reasoned that there was currently insufficient domestic production required to support the domestic electronics manufacturing industry.
The Defense Production Act ruling also holds a request for an increase in "advanced packaging". This refers to multiple apparatus being packaged and mounted onto a single electronic device, which creates a smaller physical footprint and in turn provides a more power efficient solution.
Franklin Turner, a government contracts lawyer at McCarter & English has posited the latest Defense Production Act would speed up signings of new contracts: "by streamlining and prioritizing the procurement processes for these critical technologies, which are used in a variety of defense theaters around the world, including the current conflict in Ukraine."
Source:
Reuters
PCBs form the basis of vital components that are integrated into military-purpose missiles and radars, in addition to electronics utilized for energy distribution and the nation's healthcare. The President continues to outline the importance of the Defense Production Act: "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."
Franklin Turner, a government contracts lawyer at McCarter & English has posited the latest Defense Production Act would speed up signings of new contracts: "by streamlining and prioritizing the procurement processes for these critical technologies, which are used in a variety of defense theaters around the world, including the current conflict in Ukraine."
18 Comments on U.S. President Invokes Defense Production Act for PCB Production
Follow the money lol
As a hobbyist, the only competitive US PCB fabs are OSHpark and Digikey Red. But the Chinese manufacturers like SeeedStudio offers not only competitive PCB manufacturing, but assembly as well. What people don't realize is that China is actually quite advanced here, with Foxxconn building 10+ layer RF boards for iPhones, and that expertise has only grown in China for the last 10 years.
Part of it is volume. The reason why OSHpark and Digikey Red can offer competitive services is that they batch together your PCBs with other customers. This takes longer however (they gotta wait for more orders to come in before they work on your particular board). To bring this back domestically, we'll have to accept higher prices, slower service as we build up volume again.
The good news is that PCB manufacturing is highly automated, and the USA is in fact very rich in resources (especially in energy costs). So the USA actually has some key advantages on PCBs over other countries. Yeah, our wages are higher, but things like chip shooters automate the bulk of the process... so PCBs don't need nearly as much human labor as other industries.
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US-based manufacturers, in general, are also stuck in the stone age as far as web goes. Digikey Red / OSHpark has done the Chinese-way. Just upload your Gerber file to a website, get a quote, and automate it through and through. Most US PCB manufacturers are "call us for a quote" or other human-to-human interactions that grossly slow things down. I think Digikey-Red is doing a great job on this front, the California-based company has created a front-end website for other PCB Manufacturers to get work through Digikey.
www.digikey.com/en/pcb-builder/
But you can see how competitive the Chinese PCB boards are by using that pcb-builder. Its an open secret, China has more volume and better prices than US Manufacturers. Even with 1-week+ shipping delays + shipping costs, the Chinese Boards will get to you faster than some of these US PCB-builders can.
Greatest thing about government estimates is $ accuracy is never a big deal pockets are always deep so lowballs are always just window dressing
If you look at any proposal for any gov project they balloon 10x easily.
Canada is an interesting equation.
Just waiting to see which Chinese startup gets the gig ;)
But $50 million isn't much of a production run at all. The fundamental issue is that US Government/Military is just not as big of a customer as Android Phones, iPhones, Game Consoles, GPUs or whatever. If we want to rebuild our PCB manufacturing base, we need to start getting those commercial customers back into domestic production.
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And while the USA's Military has been active for the past century, we haven't had a proper industrial scale war since Vietnam at least. So when it comes to an industrial-scale "pump out more equipment" kind of fight, we're not as prepared for that as we'd like to be. The Ukrainian conflict is making that clear as we're stretching our production already and we're not even an active participant.
Part of the secret of military production is that peace-time production serves as a training-grounds for war. Pumping things out like video game consoles or iPhones is a test to the size and scale that your industry can get to, and is an indirect measure of how a country would perform in a fight. The traditional WW2 reality was that car factories (originally designed for peacetime) turned into tank factories almost immediately. (Think Ford, GM, Volkswagen, and Mitsubishi in WW2, all turned into war manufacturing without much issue).
I'm with Dragontamer. This needs to balloon about 10x to be effective, at least. So maybe we can pray for that.
This is much more boring than you can scheme up in your mind ,trust me. Even if I was conspiratorially minded here, you are missing the evidence at the starting gate.
That little bit didn't stop him/ family while vise though :laugh:
Nothing illegal about that stuff though so ;)
But hell this could also just be a monthly payment.