The industry will face old and new challenges in the new year.

This year’s supply chain issues and looming economic uncertainty have many PCB buyers wondering about 2025.

Here are the top three challenges the PCB industry will face next year. How prepared are you?

Precious metals. The price of gold is up nearly 30% this year, hitting another all-time high last month. As a consequence, PCB buyers should expect a price bump in board pricing for both new and repeat orders.

Heightened concerns about inflation and economic stability continue to make gold an attractive safe haven. Even with hopes of a better economy next year, don’t expect prices to drop to 2023 levels any time soon.

2025 could bring demand spikes and component availability tightening. Are you prepared?

Hurricanes Helene and Milton delivered unprecedented damage throughout the Southeast US. Rebuilding efforts will take years in some locations. In western North Carolina, some people lost their homes, their families and their employers. In those cases, it isn’t a matter of just rebuilding a home; they are rebuilding their entire lives. Sadly, while everyone contributes when the disaster is in the news, those contributions stop when the news cycle moves on.

So, before I start my column on the business upside of natural disasters, I encourage everyone to remember the impacted communities. Personally, I’m budgeting to keep giving to charities helping those areas for the next several months. I’m also buying from companies in North Carolina to help local businesses stay in business.

Four important lessons gleaned over a three-decade design career.

There’s an old saying among test pilots: “Any landing that you can walk away from is a good landing.” They also know that there are old pilots, there are bold pilots, but no old, bold pilots – or so the saying goes. If you want to hang around as a PCB designer, you can only hope to walk away from your mistakes with your career intact. So, this is a chance to learn from my mistakes from 35 years of design work.

Going all the way back to the ’90s finds me in my first PCB design role. I had just taken an internal transfer to the commercial side of the business after a couple of years of feeding from the government trough. My manager on the mil-spec side, Merrill, was a father of a dozen children and was an all-around nice guy, perhaps a bit of a pushover.

Before applying for the transfer, I wanted to talk with Merrill, so I came up behind him and asked if he wanted to go to Armadillo Willy’s, a local barbecue place, for lunch. I didn’t see that he had a sandwich in his hand and was about to take the first bite. Instead, the sandwich hit the desk with a thunk, and we were off to the restaurant. Such was his dedication to his people.

Wise use of AI could be the key to our sustainability and survival.

AI is the technology of the day, and I have commented positively on its properties and potential many times in this column. Building AI into new products and services has become a marketing prerequisite. AI applications in the cloud offer easy access and fast answers to complex computing challenges, delivering great value for commercial organizations and novel services for consumers. And in devices such as PCs, smartphones and wearables, AI is the critical ingredient to enable the kinds of intuitive, human-like interactions people want to have with their tech today.

The AI in our smartphone cameras knows what our photographs should look like and adjusts the settings accordingly – a process that would take experts several minutes using Lightroom now happens inside our phones in milliseconds before we even see the picture. We even have bicycles that can warn the rider of a puncture with a tiny inertial sensor that integrates machine learning to monitor handling, giving the safety of a tire-pressure monitoring system (TPMS) without the expense of tire-pressure sensors.