Biden Invokes Defense Production Act For Printed Circuit Board Production (reuters.com) 100
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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Re:PCBs are the least of our worries (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:PCBs are the least of our worries (Score:5, Informative)
wow your notion of printed circuit boards is decades old. Modern multilayer boards, that can have up to 60 layers, have embedded components and are formed under high pressure and temperature.
The only issue here is that 50 million dollars is a farce, a drop in the bucket.
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You are hilariously behind the times, Gramps. Your PC has at least 8 -12, some have 24 or more! Do you have smartphone? 10 or more layers!
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also, your homebrew happy fun kit is irrelevant, we're talking commercial here. Four layers, that's cute, was a thing in 1960s and quite common in 1980s.
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Ever heard of the CHIPS and Science Act?
Re:PCBs are the least of our worries (Score:4, Insightful)
So you want to reduce investment in energy independence to put that money into chip independence? Seems like it would be better to do both
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"So you want to reduce investment in energy independence"
On the contrary, we were energy independent before the current administration and the bill would restore our energy independence. So my proposal would do both.
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Seems like we're importing a lot of oil and then burning it which is costing us a lot in health impacts and damage from climate change. Your proposal doesn't do anything to address those issues, in fact it would make them worse
Re:PCBs are the least of our worries (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry but your information is drastically out of date. Prior to the current administration we were exporting excess oil, not importing it. That is what energy independent means.
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Yep. And fracking is so safe, and the oil never runs out. And let's not forget the tax breaks and subsidies for fracking.
And I've got $1 that says you don't live anywhere near where they're fracking.
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I live in Texas and they've been fracking here since the 1950's and fracking has been occurring in the US since the 1860's. Certainly nothing that happened when we gained energy independence in the last administration.
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While technically true (we are exporting oil), it's not relevant as we're still importing nearly half our oil.
Better than that is to just not need as much oil which is what the current administration is doing. Better for the economy, better for our health, better for the planet. Basically it's win-win-win unless you're an oil company
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You are being pedantic on what you call 'oil' to paint a false picture here. We are both importing and exporting oil/hydrocarbon exports all the time as with any other trade good. By that metric all it would have taken was Nancy Pelosi ordering some vegetable oil off amazon.co.uk to blow it.
But the bottom line is we are currently net negative in hydrocarbon energy exported. We were net positive under the previous administration. In other words produced more units of hydrocarbon energy than we consumed.
This
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The key point is we're still dependent on foreign oil. If other countries suddenly stopped providing us oil we'd be in a rough spot. That we're able to export petroleum products at a similar rate that we import them shows that we're probably good with the production of they types we have, we just need to reduce dependence on the types we're importing
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Sorry but your information is drastically out of date. Prior to the current administration we were exporting excess oil, not importing it. That is what energy independent means.
Completely false. American oil companies are free to sell their oil on the world markets at market price so when something happens like a Russian oil embargo, prices soar domestically as oil is sold overseas. We have never been energy independent because our refineries can’t process the kind of oil that is most produced making the US rely on trade.
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And who do you claim we trade this useless oil we produce with? While it is true we actually import and export a great deal of hydrocarbon energy (which SHOULDN'T require nitpicking and be fairly summarized as 'oil' for general conversation) it is false to suggest this is because we can't refine it. We take advantage of market pricing and sell lower energy density product and purchase higher energy density product because it results in a net positive fiscal result not because we are unable to process what w
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As someone mentioned earlier on a different part of a thread..."why not do both at once?"
It really does NOT make sense to cut the legs out from under the US for energy we are currently dependent upon....before we are ready for full on use of green and renewable energy sources.
We ne
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This is about investing in renewables that will replace fossil fuels. We don't need to invest more in fossil fuels
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You get most ignorant comment of the day.
PCBs are typically fibreglass resin based, not ‘plastic’, and have an insane amount of labor intensive processes.
That’s what killed local PCB making in the west. Labor costs.
You right about the rest of the supply chain. PCBs are nothing with resistors, capacitors, semiconductors, connectors, but that supply chain is pretty widespread.
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> our entire parts industry
Have you seen the YouTube tours of the electronic parts shopping malls in China?
They're teeming with small-business vendor booths each filled with thousands of the most useful and/or obscure parts you could want for a build.
Imagine having the entire DigiKey, Adafruit, Sparkfun, Grainger, and Amazon electronics catalogs within a few city blocks, at, say, 20% of the shipped US cost.
US Governments would never permit such a thing to exist.
The PCB problem is downstream of a culture
Risky (Score:1)
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Not really. There are US PCB manufacturers already, presumably they'll take the loot an invest in more automation or just take a cruise.
This is great, if ... (Score:2)
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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)
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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
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Joke's on you, this is where a bunch of those raspberry pi 4's are going! /s
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Yeah, they definitely don't want to pay $2 a square inch. Neither do the hobbyists.
Defence maybe.
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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.
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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.
That's great and all (Score:1)
But how about some tanks, man?
WHICH printed circuit board, though? (Score:1)
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)
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.
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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.
Is it actually going to be domestic this time? (Score:1)
The "domestic" chip production money largely went to foreign entities who opened some empty warehouses in the US.
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"Their calls have been heard, and today five major chipmakers — GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung Foundry, TSMC, and Texas Instruments — are building new semiconductor production facilities in the U.S. These efforts will inevitably be bolstered by a new wave of funding provided by the newly-approved CHIPS act. This U.S. subsidy initiative will pump $52 billion into new US-based chip fabs and provide fresh tax incentives. Those funds will spur a wave of new investment over the coming years, and its
Re:Is it actually going to be domestic this time? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yup and GlobalFoundries is for all intents is an American company with an HQ in NY, just doing the Cayman Islands tax scheme (also very American)
Korea and Taiwan are strong US allies and economic partners so while they are "foreign" that is for sure a spectrum. Just like Honda, Toyota and Hyundai have long been employers of hundreds of thousands of American workers for decades making products in America for global markets.
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No doubt but there is still a level of strategic technology they are going to want to keep at home. I doubt they'll be sending their latest 1.5nm into a foreign fab and there might be limits on what they'll be willing to produce for US military and strategic applications.
The other factor is purely fiscal. Spending $50 billion on infrastructure is a huge sum of money but it is actually neutral if the money is sunk into the US... it hasn't really left our economy. That stops being true if the money and the pr
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I doubt they'll be sending their latest 1.5nm into a foreign fab and there might be limits on what they'll be willing to produce for US military and strategic applications.
Maybe but really at the end of the day they are going to use the fab to build whichever products are in demand, that will trump any secrecy concerns, plus the military procurement end of things is very much out of left field for most companies and even then you're dealing with "the Army" you're dealing with Lockheed or Northrop and if there really is a COTS chip they need but can't buy they'll get it through backchannels or just design around it. I highly doubt there are many top chipmakers out there that
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"The answer here is the same as if it was a domestic company; tax policy."
It isn't about taxation. If they were domestic we could drop their taxes to 0% and we'd come out ahead. Profits from operations just go back into expanding operations and with a domestic operation either that expansion occurs in the US or it is engineered so the benefit comes back to the US. We don't just get the immediate investment in our economy, we get the growth and even if the company isn't paying taxes growing means spending an
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It's true a domestic operation might pump that money generated into more domestic operations but unless it is baked into the law for receiving the funds there's just as much a guarantee of that with a foreign company as a domestic one. The domestic company could just as easily use those profits to build another fab overseas or in reality those profits just go back to the shareholders of which for public companies could be anyone anywhere and again, no guarantee that means more domestic production.
All these
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"Who in this case are we expecting is going to replicate the feat? The workers at the fab? Do they own their own company?"
Yes the workers at the fab... but also the workers researching and developing the process, building and calibrating the actual machines used in the fab, building and designing the fab itself. US Citizens having the knowledge and technology is the US having the technology and having the leverage that comes with it.
"Are domestic companise enforced to share their trade secrets?"
If they want
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These plans have got to be scaring Tawian's that we will protect them. If anything, it is almost like asking China to wait a few years to invade Taiwan so that we won't be impacted.
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"Why? The goal is to have capacity here."
That's simple. First the companies themselves from top to bottom would not have mixed loyalties. Foreign companies might wish to limit strategic level technologies, military applications, etc.
The other reason is fiscal. Infrastructure spending that goes to US companies isn't actually lost money. If we give TSMC $20 Billion dollars that is $20 Billion dollars gone and maybe a 2nd tier chip fab to show for it if they don't simply start construction and bail when they g
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"We won't hand TSMC $20B with which to run. They will spend $100B or so on a factory and the US will subsidize $20B in incentives."
I'll yield the point because I don't know what strings and milestones they've put on it. But they'll own that factory and take the proceeds from its operations overseas. If we do ever seize it we'll have to pay them that $100B (we really should patch that loophole, paying fair value should only be a requirement for US citizens).
"But since these are publicly listed companies that
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But TSMC's success is due to it's use of extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment that comes from ASML in the Netherlands. ASML is the most valuable European tech company. Should China invade Taiwan TSMC will still require products from ASLM and probably other international companies. China wont be able to continue running TSMC by itself. That said an invasion would be catastrophic not only for AMD, Nvidia and Apple but also in term
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That remains to be seen but since their loyalties are to somewhere else it is unlikely their first tier fab technologies and technologies of strategic military importance will be happening there. More importantly that $50 billion (or the portion they get) primarily goes overseas.
The beauty of infrastructure spending is normally it is spending that entirely happens and produces in the US which makes it a net neutral expenditure at worst. That stops being true when we give it to a foreign entity... we are lit
Dude, just use PCBWay (Score:1)
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$50mm?
50 milli milli dollars? That's not a lot of money.
or 50 millimeters? That's not money at all.
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>In financial documents you write mm for millions of dollars
In a very small subset of places in the world. The rest of us use SI units.
More catching up. (Score:5, Insightful)
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: More catching up. (Score:2)
If you think this started in 2000, you should try to dig up a rip of the Star Wars Christmas special that shows unions decrying off shoring at least back to the 80s...
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Financilization of the economy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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It didn't?
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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
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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
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Sssh. you're ruining the narrative with numbers.
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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.
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Sorry, Charlie (Score:2)
$50M to the US military is like $5 to a household (Score:3)
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?
lol "Biden wrote"... (Score:1)
Russia in Ukraine is writing on the wall (Score:2)
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.