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Biden Invokes Defense Production Act For Printed Circuit Board Production (reuters.com) 100

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
New submitter Ironsights shares a report: U.S. President Joe Biden has invoked the Defense Production Act to spend $50 million on domestic and Canadian production of printed circuit boards, citing the technology's importance to national defense. Printed circuit boards are incorporated into missiles and radars, as well as electronics used for energy and healthcare. 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," Biden wrote in the memo. "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," Biden said. The move would speed up contracts, said Franklin Turner, a government contracts lawyer at McCarter & English, "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."
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Biden Invokes Defense Production Act For Printed Circuit Board Production More

Biden Invokes Defense Production Act For Printed Circuit Board Production

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  • As in, this is one off loot. Whoever takes the chance has to be confident it will work out in the medium to long term.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      Not really. There are US PCB manufacturers already, presumably they'll take the loot an invest in more automation or just take a cruise.

  • To have a domestic source for PCB (on an off note, my support friend called PCB Personal Computer Bitch) is great, as shipping can get quite fast on domestic, but it has to compare in price to stuff coming from China, otherwise wallets will talk when it comes to personal ordering. The government, on the other hand, will love it!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yeah, it's hard to argue with $2 boards out of China. There needs to be more done about the general cost of doing business in the US.

      If something is $50,000 in the U.S...but $5,000 in China...what do you expect to happen? Suck up $45,000 for the sake of "patriotism"? (speaking from experience of ordering an injection mold)

      • If something is $50,000 in the U.S...but $5,000 in China...what do you expect to happen? Suck up $45,000 for the sake of "patriotism"? (speaking from experience of ordering an injection mold)

        It depends what you are building, doesn't it?

        If you need to test board performance and multiple iterations are likely to be necessary, shorter turnaround from a local source might well save money by getting the project done sooner. The cost of the components is likely to be much higher than the PCB itself. For specialized small volume production, $45k is a roundoff error compared to what you are burning in engineering resources on the whole project.

        Consider a medical device where that overly expensive ass

    • Except this has nothing at all to do with fast-turn hobbyist PCBs. This has to do with large-scale manufacturing of boards for other products. Your $2/sqin for 10 boards wallet can talk all it wants, but it's the companies ordering 100,000 boards that actually matter when it comes to US capacity.
      • I would have thought a lot of defense production is for relatively small quantity items. For example Lockheed Martin produces about 4,600 HIMARS missiles of the type sent to Ukraine per year, and the boards inside presumably have some pretty application-specific design requirements.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Yeah, they definitely don't want to pay $2 a square inch. Neither do the hobbyists.

        Defence maybe.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Octorian ( 14086 )

      Yeah, and I thought we already had domestic producers. Its just that they're so much more expensive than China, that I don't think anybody actually uses them unless cost is no object and/or they really need to.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cats-paw ( 34890 )

      it's not just having domestic production of PCBs that is important, it's having domestic production of the kind of high density, "exotic" material PCBs which are needed for all sorts of things, not just weapon systems.

      the number of PCB manufacturers in the US has dropped dramatically.

  • But how about some tanks, man?

  • Do they not understand that there is no commodity or good called "Printed Circuit Boards" ?

    Each PCB is a custom device involving each layer printed that is very specific to the exact circuit that is going to be mounted to it.

    They're going to prioritize manufacture of ALL million+ types of PCBs, including the ones that go into kids toys and game machines?

    That would seem like a misuse of the defense act.. I understand the PCBs that go into missiles could be quite important, but they should specify "

    • Re:WHICH printed circuit board, though? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @11:16AM (#63406178)

      There's no commodity or good called "integrated circuits" either. This is about ensuring there is domestic capability to produce these items, not about producing any particular item. The low-complexity, high-volume PCBs like for toys and toasters will get made by the lowest bidder which will still likely be in Asia; but for the mission-critical, bleeding-edge stuff, there needs to be a domestic source.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Shaitan ( 22585 )

      I think you are largely mixing up PCB designs with PCB manufacturing. The millions of PCB design out there are usually produced by central PCB manufacturers. It isn't nearly as secretive a process as chip production and there are variations but certainly not millions.

  • The "domestic" chip production money largely went to foreign entities who opened some empty warehouses in the US.

  • $50mm will get you 50 million boards by next Monday.

  • More catching up. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Tuesday March 28, 2023 @11:12AM (#63406162)

    More catching up. USA should've never, ever shipped our production overseas. Now we make precious few things here, and have to import.

    I don't even know the "whys" of this. Unprofitable to make here? Green concerns that don't exist in other countries?

    Whatever the cause, now it's plain for all to see that in the interest of money and green agendas, we've lost our manufacturing ability.

    Make it here. Sell it here. Sell it abroad too, if others want it.. but FFS, make our cars here, our TVs here, our speakers here, our pencils, pens, paper, tires, everything. We shouldn't be dependent on foreign countries, ever.

    For today's friend may be tomorrow's enemy, and yesterday's enemy may be today's friend. You just never know.. so make it all here, like we used to, and still can do, had we the political cojones to make it happen.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kackle ( 910159 )
      Wouldn't a ubiquitous import tax fix this? Otherwise it's, "Who cares if there are options here, it's still cheaper from China!"

    • Financilization of the economy.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • The answer no one wants to talk about is that China has a smarter government. If you look at the old Marxist ideas that shaped the original communist revolution, they critiqued the capitalist as an entity who controls and taxes the *means of production*, while labor actually does the production. Consequently, the communist revolutions were about seizing the *means of production*, and they were able to make their own rifles and tanks and everything after that. Evolving that philosophy forward into a modern s

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Make it here. Sell it here. Sell it abroad too, if others want it.. but FFS, make our cars here, our TVs here, our speakers here, our pencils, pens, paper, tires, everything. We shouldn't be dependent on foreign countries, ever.

      Cars are made domestically - even foreign makes often have domestric production (e.g., Toyota). Some people consider the domestically made vehicles inferior to the foreign made versions, though. Sometimes the Canadian made ones are superior, but those serve Canada and Mexico since th

      • Make it here. Sell it here. Sell it abroad too, if others want it.. but FFS, make our cars here, our TVs here, our speakers here, our pencils, pens, paper, tires, everything. We shouldn't be dependent on foreign countries, ever.

        Cars are made domestically - even foreign makes often have domestric production (e.g., Toyota). Some people consider the domestically made vehicles inferior to the foreign made versions, though. Sometimes the Canadian made ones are superior, but those serve Canada and Mexico since the US has its own productions.

        Pencils, pens, paper, tires are often made domestically as well. After all, North America is awash in wood making pencils and paper more economical to make. Tires are made everywhere.

        TVs aren't because people want to pay less for stuff and no one wants to pay two year's worth of disposable income (as it was in the past) to buy a single TV.

        PCB manufacturing is tricky - a lot of advanced PCB fab techniques are held in Japan, for example (we did our PCB manufacturing with Panasonic). One of the larger problems is that there is a lot of legacy manufacturing where PCB widths are limited to around 16" or so, while China's newer facilities can handle 40" panels. It's basically impossible to retrofit without replacing all the manufacturing equipment. Larger panels make it much more economically efficient to mass manufacture.

        It is nice that the USA is going to spend money on making PCB's in their hat, eh. There are *some* benefits to being a client state of the USA, as long as you do what you are told.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hasaf ( 3744357 )
      At the time it happened, there was a lot of faith in Ricardo's theory of competitive advantage; the idea that everyone would be better off. The expectations were that the big winners would pay to have the losers retrained and, as stated, everyone would be better off.

      There was also the idea that as nations integrated into the world economy, the more they would move toward being truly liberal (in the free speech way) and democratic they would become. This would extend the "peace dividend." Again, everyone

    • More catching up. USA should've never, ever shipped our production overseas. Now we make precious few things here, and have to import.

      I don't even know the "whys" of this. Unprofitable to make here? Green concerns that don't exist in other countries?

      Why? Some places have better conditions to make certain things. Why insist on making TV locally if Sony makes great ones. Or cars if ze Germans are so good at it. Just do something else instead and trade it. This generally helps improve relations too (to a point, as we can see).

      The US is obviously big enough that trying to force everything to be made locally could work but generally this strategy doesn't work for shit. See Brazil for example. Let alone any smaller countries.

      Now obviously this has some downs

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jbengt ( 874751 )

      Whatever the cause, now it's plain for all to see that in the interest of money and green agendas, we've lost our manufacturing ability.

      China has 4 times the population of the US, but less than twice the manufacturing output, as of 2019 (who knows what the pandemic did to those outputs)
      What we've lost is the ability to make cheap commodity stuff at a cost competitive with cheap labor countries. We still do a decent amount of the more sophisticated manufacturing that requires less labor but more capital

    • If it makes you feel better, $50million is not enough to make it happen. Its only enough for the bureaucratic planning industrial complex to employ a think tank for a year.

    • Way back when, it was cheap to dump toxic waste and production by-products where we live - Love Canal, anyone? How about excess Ford paint being dumped down abandoned mines and filtering into the water system? - and people got sick (literally) of pollution in their back yards, in their air, in their rivers - remember when the Cuyahoga River actually, literally burned? - so manufacturers shipped that overseas where things like Bhopal were bad, sure, but it's not like Union Carbide was killing white people.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ErstO ( 1696262 )
      I'm old enough to remember the 80's when factories started moving out of the US to Japan and China, there were plenty tax benefits for factory relocations and with the lower labor cost it was profitable for US companies to send their factories overseas, and it accelerated in the 90's So to answer your question of "Why", Money, corporate green was all anyone was looking at
  • I wonder what the US PCB makers think of this.

  • The US military budget [wikipedia.org] for 2024 is $824B. The median US household income [cnbc.com] in 2021 was $71k ($80k in 2023 thanks to inflation). Biden's token $50M is a mere 0.006% of that, equivalent to $4.75 for a middle class household.

    This is like giving $5 to a soup kitchen and claiming you're fighting hunger. You're not wrong, but did you make a notable commitment?

  • He's barely functional, man. You know it, I know it.

  • US is learning from Russia that in order to fight a 21st century war you need to have the whole supply chain for your weapons available in house or you run the risk of running out of important components. Even the simplest of parts could be crucial and non-replaceable in a critical moment. We no long live in a world where we could all go down to the factory and pound rivets for the war effort. We would need to seriously ramp up internal knowledge and production just to get back to square zero.

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