U.S. Government Will Support Domestic PCB Manufacturing

Nvidia Teardown
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Advanced chips made using leading-edge process technologies often need high-quality multi-layer motherboards. To ensure that such printed circuit boards (PCBs) can be produced in the U.S., President Joe Biden this week signed a presidential determination authorizing the use of Defense Production Act (DPA) to support domestic PCB and advanced chip packaging industries with $50 million. 

Gradual migration of high-tech industry from the United States to Asia in the recent decades affected not only sophisticated semiconductor production and high-volume assembly of consumer electronics, but also things like chip packaging and production of PCBs. Meanwhile, all electronics devices — from a humble mouse all the way to a mission critical server or a piece of military equipment — use some kind of a motherboard, so the ability to produce sophisticated PCBs in the U.S. is also a matter of national security.

The presidential determination lets the Department of Defense use $50 million to provide DPA Title III incentives — including purchases and purchase commitments — to support the PCB and Advanced Packaging industries in the U.S.

While the U.S. government is interested in production of PCBs for use in national defense, energy, healthcare, and other crucial sectors in America, companies that receive subsidies from DoD will gain the technological capability and knowhow necessary to produce advanced boards in general, and will be able to serve other sectors as a result. We can only speculate whether this could eventually bring production of things such as graphics cards or PC motherboards back to the U.S. — it's definitely a possibility.

In fact, companies such as AMD, Apple, Google, Intel, Nvidia, and many others produce a variety of motherboards for their devices in the U.S. for test purposes, before initiating volume production in Asia. At least some American companies could expand their PCB and packaging operations in the U.S. to serve clients here — if they receive the right financial incentives.

"Without Presidential action under section 303 of the Act, United States industry cannot reasonably be expected to provide the capability for the needed industrial resource, material, or critical technology item in a timely manner," Biden wrote in a memo. "I find that action to expand the domestic production capability for printed circuit boards and advanced packaging is necessary to avert an industrial resource or critical technology item shortfall that would severely impair national defense capability."

Anton Shilov
Contributing Writer

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.

  • MBOO7
    Lets be real, the problem is not just funding the corresponding industry fabs, but rather that that kind of industry will never ever be as price competitive as asian counterparts, it would always have to be on life support ever after.
    Labor and energy costs and also environmental protection regulations are totally different in both regions.
    Reply
  • PlaneInTheSky
    MBOO7 said:
    Labor and energy costs and also environmental protection regulations are totally different in both regions.

    Taiwan's average monthly wage is $3,534. This puts it only slightly behind the US and Qatar, but ahead of every EU country. It is over 3 times the wage a person in Poland makes.

    Cheap labor? No.

    Taiwan spends billion of $ on tax breaks for chip companies and aggressively uses patents to keep out foreign competitors.

    Massive tax incentives and anti-competitive behavior? Yes.
    Reply
  • edzieba
    PlaneInTheSky said:
    Taiwan's average monthly wage is $3,534. This puts it only slightly behind the US and Qatar, but ahead of every EU country. It is over 3 times the wage a person in Poland makes.

    Cheap labor? No.

    Taiwan spends billion of $ on tax breaks for chip companies and aggressively uses patents to keep out foreign competitors.

    Massive tax incentives and anti-competitive behavior? Yes.
    No. Tax breaks are nice, but those are present elsewhere too.
    The real answer is supply chain consolidation. In a tiny geographic area around Taiwan, South Korea, and the south-east China coast, are basically every industry needed to go from a concept a completed manufactured products. Right from raw material processing to chip fabs to plastic manufacture to case injection moulding to paper production and packaging printing, etc. Passive components (caps, resistors, etc), ICs, buttons, displays, and so on. All within days of each other even by bulk sea freight, or within minutes to hours for some stages (e.g. if you live in the Huaqiang Bei area, you could be in literal walking distance from PCB fab and population houses, injection moulders, assembly houses, and packager/shippers, and could go from concept to shipped product within days, or even within a day if you can take advantage of existing moulds).
    Moving or replicating that entire stack of multiple industries domestically is a multi-trillion dollar operation. It's no good having domestic PCB manufacture and domestic large IC fabs if you then need to import all the passives from halfway around the planet, or have to ship the components you just made to SEA for assembly.
    Reply