Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1484263
14 PCB007 MAGAZINE I NOVEMBER 2022 do well with conventional work, we believe advancing capabilities is sound, if not neces- sary, business strategy. We want to attract the best engineers and the strongest workforce, and a company full of people working for the "good of the country" is important work, easy to sell, and exciting to be part of. LaBeau: Our prevailing theory is that you can't maintain a rich and engaged workforce if you're just a build-to-print shop, with no room to innovate, design, or develop new techno- logical solutions. e engineers are not going to stay. We made the choice to help bring manufacturing innovation back to the U.S. with young, smart, and creative engineers, and a workforce that works hard every day for a good cause, protecting our nation and helping the U.S. be globally competitive with the prod- ucts we produce in the United States. Johnson: You're saying that the PCB shops that decided to focus on punching them out have lost that technological edge? ey don't have the skill set in their staff to move forward? LaBeau: at is not necessarily true; we have discovered that it is vitally important to engage and develop their skill sets. ere are shops doing great stuff, especially in the advanced HDI arena. When you start to get sub-25 micron, you don't see much domestic tech- nology because the supply chain is not com- pletely informed yet: "We may have a chem- istry for that, but it is likely what is in Asia." From those comments you can begin to paint a picture about the domestic marketplace. Johnson: You don't necessarily know where this is going until you get on the path. LaBeau: Yes, and we don't know where it will go. We're reflecting on the same things you are reflecting on as a business case right now. If we capitalize, then on what? What capacity do we need? Do we capitalize an amount and then hope there will be additional support to increase the investment? We learn from our customers that they're waking up to the idea of wanting to have American made application- specific substrates. at's where that market niche might be for America. Brassard: And an on ramp for U.S. PCB manu- facturers who are paying attention. An Intel plant producing millions of pro- cessors will likely want a large-scale narrowly focused interposer plant nearby, but that's not where the U.S. PCB industry will begin its journey to relevance, and dare I say, great- ness. Rather, U.S. defense, aerospace, tele- communications, and medical OEMs are look- ing for novel application-specific substrates to go with their highly proprietary and guarded ASIC designs. If you buy a substrate in Asia, you must fit their formula for what they build, like get- ting your carry-on to fit in the little box before you can take it on to the airplane. eir nar- row design parameters allow them to achieve 99.96% yields. erefore, domestic manufac- turers have an opportunity to do for OEMs what Asia will not or cannot, that is to produce novel substrate designs that don't fit the Asian mold. Suddenly, U.S. manufacturers are back We want to attract the best engineers and the strongest workforce, and a company full of people working for the "good of the country" is important work, easy to sell, and exciting to be part of.