Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1463464
42 SMT007 MAGAZINE I APRIL 2022 Johnson: Great. Do you work only with elec- tronics manufacturing or is your scope wider than that? Bonner: It is a wider scope. ere are certain industries that are hot right now. e semi- conductor and printed circuit board industries are certainly important because of an extreme national interest in reshoring those capabili- ties. We also work with other manufacturers producing more traditional finished goods like vehicle systems and aerospace applications. Johnson: Could you compare what you see from DEFCERT's perspective with respect to the state of the PCB manufacturing indus- try for DEFCERT compared to semiconduc- tor, and compared to more general manufac- turing? Bonner: Being an outsider, I see that the PCB manufacturing industry moved its expertise and capabilities offshore because of the incen- tives to do it. You could do strong design work here and leave the manufacturing to someone else. But in other parts of the manufacturing verticals in the United States, there was always something holding the fit, finish, or the overall finished good itself domestically. Maybe it was assembly or prototyping, testing and trialing, or something else. e amount of manufactur- ing expertise and scalability that has le the PCB industry and now needs to be reclaimed, which is equally important, is a bigger shi than we see in other parts of the manufactur- ing base in the U.S. Johnson: at's an interesting point. What we call a finished piece is actually a sub-assembly. A U.S.-based consumer electronics or appli- ance company making washing machines, let's say, will see the printed circuit board as a sub-assembly, while we see it as the finished product, To the OEM, it's just a component of the product that was moved to offshore sourcing. Bonner: Absolutely. As cyber-physical systems and integrated systems move into almost every arena of traditional products through- out the consumer and commercial and govern- ment space, we're realizing that chipsets are in everything now. It's not a localized or central- ized function or capability. It's interesting to plot the lines of that trajec- tory. When we want capability, we don't add it with a smoother surface, a better springload, or rate; we do it with computed capability and real-time information. If we want to keep building capability and subsequently compet- itive advantage, we must include computing horsepower in almost every application. e increased dependence on chipsets, especially distributed chipsets, embedded systems, and cyber physical systems, is apparent. Johnson: We know that sensors are going into automobiles in a wholesale way, whether it's collision avoidance systems, radar, LiDAR, etc. 5G is promising to bring better data com- munications at the vehicle-to-vehicle level so that automotive vehicle telemetry from a vehi- cle a half-mile ahead of us, for example, can be used by my vehicle for advanced warning Ryan Bonner