What do you do when the very thing for which you’ve been asking, nay, begging for years actually materializes?

That would be US government support for the printed circuit board industry. And it’s coming in the form of real dollars, not just platitudes.

As we report in our digital edition this month, the US Partnership for Assured Electronics (USPAE), a subsidiary IPC formed last year to give it room to lobby on behalf of US members without running afoul of its international cohort, has as of late January garnered more than $42 million in taxpayer dollars to manage joint industry-academia programs to tackle electronics-related challenges.

How we’ve waited for this.

Going back to the 1990s, when I worked at IPC, we spent thousands of hours (and countless more dollars) vainly waving our hands in front of Congress’s collective face. And once a year, we would gather in Washington and run from office to office on Capitol Hill telling anyone and everyone how important the industry is. After, we would retreat to our hotel bars and pat each other on the back for a job well done. After many years of this, Congress even passed a resolution. “The PCB industry is important!” they said. “Hallelujah!” we rejoiced. Our souls were saved. Or so we thought. Then the OEMs packed up and moved their orders to Taiwan and China. Poof.

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How to respond to supplier price increases.

Demand for printed circuit boards is going up. But so are production costs.

Raw PCB material pricing has jumped about 40% since June, with the exact increase dependent on material type. This price increase was inevitable and is, in fact, overdue.

During the early months of the Covid crisis, most PCB suppliers were hesitant to pass on their already-increasing material costs. But as China has rebounded faster from the Covid slowdown than the US and Europe, demand for production has escalated. PCB vendors are now more willing to pass higher material costs onto their customers. And the price increases are by no means over.

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Government incentives are just part of the formula.

Government-led directives of late are aimed squarely at bringing manufacturing back to the US. President Biden recently signed an executive order requiring the federal government to buy more goods produced in the United States and limiting the ability of federal agencies to issue waivers on overseas purchases.

Earlier, then-President Trump had approved regulations that increased the share of a product’s components that must be produced domestically to qualify as US-made. He also imposed a 25% tariff on goods imported from China.

The $740 billion 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which took effect in January, includes a provision forbidding the purchase by the Department of Defense of printed circuit boards manufactured in potentially adversarial countries such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Many in our industry have welcomed this new directive as a means of rebuilding the once-robust PCB manufacturing climate in the United States.

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Our expert troubleshoots three common problems.

Regular readers of this column and certainly most process engineers are acutely aware of the multitude of problems that can arise in the stencil printing process if it is not optimized. With numerous inputs and variables – shown in the fishbone diagram (FIGURE 1) – the number of things that can go wrong are many, but that shouldn’t portend that things will go wrong. Stencil printing, as I’ve said before, can be simplified into having the right amount of material at the right time in the right place. Therefore, too little or too much material, or improper timing or location, can result in defects. On the flip side, knowing how to avoid or correct the most common printing defects can mitigate against proliferation and secure successful results. This month, we look at the basics, discuss the top three printing-related defects and the problems they cause, and share advice on how to resolve them. (Caveat: There are multiple potential causes and cures; here, we discuss the most common.)

Problem: Insufficients (too little material).
Potential result: A dry joint or a faulty/unreliability interconnect in the field can cause a broken circuit, often brought on by temperature or vibration stress.
How to avoid or correct:

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