Issue link: https://iconnect007.uberflip.com/i/1513227
DECEMBER 2023 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 77 money—almost $7 million for 80 jobs in the Upper Peninsula that didn't exist before. It's a great example of a government partnership that builds out high tech manufacturing capa- bility. Additionally, the DoD invested under the DPA almost $40 million for Calumet to fab- ricate more advanced defense-specific PCBs. at is exactly what the DPA is for. TTM is investing almost $100 million of its own money to expand UHDI PCB capability in Syracuse, New York. It's a tremendous part- nership that will create hundreds of new jobs in Syracuse. So, while we wait on Washington to do these other things, state governments and the Pentagon are acting, as is private industry. It seems to me that the funding from the CHIPS Act, which is administered by the Department of Commerce, may be the slow- est moving portion. e journey of the CHIPS program, from ide- ation to signature on the president's desk, took almost four years. During that time, as Con- gress was discussing whether America should invest in semiconductor production capacity, the pandemic made it very clear where the sup- ply chains were weak. We had customers wait- ing to buy pickup trucks because the factories couldn't get chips. e combination of scar- city and major interruptions in supply chain, on top of a political willingness to do industrial policy, is what got the CHIPS Act done. ink about it: It took us four years to get the CHIPS Act signed, and we had some of the largest companies in the world—Intel, Micron, and TSMC, and an enormously powerful and influential trade association—pushing the President and the Secretary of Commerce. By comparison, we hadn't even launched PCBAA yet, and it's been an organization very much borne out of this tumult. America will do industrial policy and restore and build out capacities for critical national technologies. Many members of our industry said, "Wait a minute, what about the rest of us? Will you really only invest in chips?" On Capitol Hill, we oen hear, "Why didn't we include this in the chipset?" I don't have a good answer. Had our industry been organized at that time, maybe we would have pushed for inclusion in that bill. Have you seen this discussion expand into the supplier side? Yes, it now includes those in the raw mate- rial space: woven glass, copper foil, and rare earths, with even lithium extractor compa- nies starting to say, "We should have been a part of this conversation as well." ese facili- ties in Chandler (Arizona), Columbus (Ohio), and other locations are wonderful, but they're not the end of the story about technologies we invented here, and technologies where we still lead. It's the manufacturing which has largely been offshored. We're oen asked, "What if we had to suddenly make more of these in a war- time or disaster environment?" e answer is that we're operating at capacity, and we would have a hard time sourcing. I'm grateful for the work that the semicon- ductor industry has done. ey helped form serious industrial policy in a bipartisan way. I am really proud that many Republicans and Democrats supported the CHIPS Act. ere were a number of reasons to get on board. Some saw this through a national security lens, David Schild