SMT007 Magazine

SMT007-Mar2022

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8 SMT007 MAGAZINE I MARCH 2022 Nolan's Notes by Nolan Johnson, I-CONNECT007 The Legislative Chokepoint "Not every country plays by the same rules," Happy Holden stated during a magazine plan- ning meeting for this issue. We were discuss- ing the recent news regarding the CHIPS for America Act that moved through the U.S. Congress last year. He continued, "e laws for banking and financing aren't the same everywhere, you know." He's right, of course. Individual coun- tries finance and subsidize industry devel- opment to their own laws and restrictions. ere's nothing new in this situation, really. It's always been this way; countries have oen taken whatever measures were necessary to develop an industry they saw as lucrative, cru- cial to their economic development, or strate- gically important to their defense. is observation from Happy, however, was particularly timely, since we were dis- cussing the U.S. legislation to bolster "the electronics industry," but which only seems to focus on semiconductor manufacturing. Any- one reading this magazine already knows that simply making more semiconductor compo- nents is not a solution to the problem, that the chips are not useful until integrated into the entire system, and that it takes chip packaging, printed circuit board fabrication, and assem- bly services to create the completed electron- ics assemblies. However, the policy makers on Capitol Hill generally seem to be unaware of this connection. e result? Investment in only a portion of the supply chain. Study the rationale for the strategic invest- ment, and you'll see that the U.S. now wishes to fix gaps in the domestic supply chain. One literally cannot manufacture a semiconduc- tor component for production entirely within the North American borders—effectively all production semiconductors must be shipped

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