You’ve probably never given much thought to the intricate network of copper and fiberglass that’s hiding inside your phone, your car, your coffee maker — even your alarm clock. But without printed circuit boards, or PCBs, none of the devices that power our modern lives would work.
“When you go hit snooze on your alarm clock, that woke you up was a printed circuit board that woke you up,” said Jesse Vaughan, a senior account manager at Summit Interconnect, a PCB manufacturer in California. “People don’t realize how ubiquitous they really are. They are everywhere.”
From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, you rely on a technology you almost never think about. It wakes you up with an alarm. It makes your coffee. It guides your car. It powers your phone, your hospital, your government and your military.
And yet, as Scott Paul, the president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, points out in a recent episode of The Manufacturing Report podcast, the United States — the nation that invented the semiconductor and so much of today’s technology — now produces a mere 4% of the world’s PCBs.
It’s a shocking statistic, and one that exposes a gaping vulnerability in America’s supply chains. Without a robust domestic PCB industry, Paul argues, our most critical systems are at risk of both disruption and hacking.
To underscore the point, the podcast features voices from “The New Frontier,” a compelling new documentary that premiered earlier this year in Washington, D.C. and went on to screen at the Poppy Jasper International Film Festival in California.
The film takes viewers behind the scenes of America’s PCB industry, introducing them to the manufacturers, engineers, and innovators who are fighting to reclaim this critical capacity before it’s too late.
One of those manufacturers is Sean Kincaid, the president of K&F Electronics in Michigan. As Kincaid explains, the domestic PCB supply chain has been decimated over the past two decades, dropping from 3,000 shops in 2004 to fewer than 150 today.
“If we ever have a situation where we need to manufacture our cell phones here in the United States, we don’t have the capacity to do it,” Kincaid warned.
So it’s so crucial that we invest something now, whether that’s through workforce, or whether that’s through a tax incentive for buying circuit boards through American companies, some small increment of maybe it’s building expansion, land expansion, some type of help, because they’re just getting decimated, because our competitors across the world are investing in their own companies on their floor, right? So we’re fighting against governments these days, and it’s not a fair fight.
The consequences of that fight, the documentary argues, go far beyond the economic. When America outsources its PCB production, it’s not just jobs and capacity that get shipped overseas — it’s intellectual property and brain power, too.
“IP is the main risk, really, you know, it’s the intellectual property,” said Vaughan. “So if we’re shipping off all of the IP offshore, and it has any implications or tentacles that go into some sort of a military application, then immediately, you know, you have the fears of the reverse engineering, the pirating, duplication, all that sort of thing.”
It’s a chilling prospect — and one that Vaughan and his fellow PCB manufacturers are determined to prevent. But as Paul notes, they can’t do it alone.
To truly reclaim America’s PCB industry, he argues, will require a concerted effort from policymakers, educators, and the public at large to recognize the critical role that manufacturing plays in our national security and economic prosperity.
“If we don’t create this awareness and then create the right incentives and the right policy to back those incentives, people are always concentrated in the political sphere of how we keep knowledge workers in high-paying jobs,” said Wesley Sprecher, the president of operations at Blue Water Components in Florida. “But the practical skills of going to an office and having tangible transferable skills, going in and being able to follow a process, be a part of a team and execute an outcome is something that is just totally lost. And I think manufacturing is really the saving grace opportunity that we have.”
It’s a message that Paul and the Alliance for American Manufacturing have been sounding for years. But with the release of “The New Frontier” and the spotlight it shines on the PCB industry, they’re hoping that more Americans will start to take notice — and take action.
“You can go to newfrontierfilm.com to see what America stands to gain as the PCB industry grows and just how much is at stake if we fail to keep this critical manufacturing capacity here at home,” Paul said.
In other words? It’s time to wake up and smell the circuit boards — before it’s too late.
To learn more about the fight to rebuild America’s PCB industry, visit newfrontierfilm.com. You can also catch the latest updates on trade and manufacturing policy at americanmanufacturing.org, and connect with the Alliance for American Manufacturing on social media @KeepItMadeinUSA.
