PCB Manufacturing: Then and Now

Let’s walk down memory lane and discover how circuit boards are being manufactured back in the 50s.

In this episode, we have the pleasure to have Gene Weiner, a true gem in the industry! This is a rare opportunity to learn from an expert who has helped shape the electronics industry for more than 60 years now.

Watch through the end, and make sure to check out the show notes and additional resources below.

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Show Highlights:

• Introduction to Gene Weiner and a glimpse of his illustrious career in the electronics industry beginning in 1956
• Gene retrospects vividly how they used to do 3D printing and additive back in the 50s
• What would interest a young man to go down the path of electronics manufacturing back in the 50’s? Gene shares his career experience and what sparked his interest in electronics
• 1975 marked the beginning of electronic manufacturing automation development outside the US
• Captive operations versus outsourcing — a lot of electronics companies chose cost reduction over maintaining their own manufacturing operations
• Gene gives his insight about moving some manufacturing facilities to Latin American countries  like Mexico and Columbia
• What does it take to bring manufacturing back to the US?
• Just building chips in America without building the rest of the supply chain here just lengthen the supply chain. Gene stresses that volume, demand, incentives, and continuous government programs are necessary to make anchoring a success
• Gene suggests that partnering is better than hiring. Partner with talents who share a mutual vision with the company, and share benefits together

Links and Resources:

• Connect with Gene Weiner on LinkedIn
• Visit Weiner International Associates' website
• Watch the related OnTrack episodes
  • A Lookback to the Evolution of the PCB Industry with Happy Holde
  • Achieving Diversified Electronics Supply Chain
  • Overcoming Technological Challenges in the PCB Industry

 

Get Your First Month of Altium Designer® for FREE

 

Transcriptions:

Gene Weiner:

He said, "Do you have a drill?" I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "Well, I have to drill some holes to put some eyelets in these panels." I said, "I'm trying to teach you how to plate." He said, "Do you have a drill?" I had a Sears Roebuck bench press, so I threw it in the back of my truck and drove it over. We took it up the freight elevator and eyeballed the holes, drilled the whole tooling holes, and took the drill back home. That's how things were made those days.

Zach Peterson:

Hello, everyone. And welcome to the Altium OnTrack Podcast. I'm your host Zach Peterson, and today I'm very happy to be speaking with Gene Weiner. You can contact him at his consultancy, Weiner International Associates. For those of you who have been in the industry for quite a while, you may know Gene Weiner. For those of you who are new, Gene Weiner is someone who has a wealth of experience and a very long and illustrious career, so I'm very happy to be talking to him today. Gene, thank you so much for joining us.

Gene Weiner:

Well, thank you, Zach. It's a pleasure to be with you. I don't know about illustrious, but it's sure been long.

Zach Peterson:

You and I talked about your background and you sent me some notes as far as how far or how long you've been in the industry. And I felt that it was quite illustrious, especially some of the things that you've accomplished over the years.

Gene Weiner:

Well, I've been lucky to be in the right place at the right time it seems as the change was happening. Believe it or not, I started in this industry in 1956 when I was at Tufts University. I was a student technician at MIT Lincoln Laboratories. And wound up in a group that was making thin film memories, additive printed circuits, 3D-printed circuitry, and so forth. At that time, we didn't have copper-clad laminates, we had copper-clad phenolic, or as we called it, the XXXP.

Zach Peterson:

You just brought up 3D printing and additive. I think most people would find that to be maybe a more recent advance in manufacturing and especially in electronics, but you guys were doing it back in the '50s.

Gene Weiner:

Well, yes, we were. I had a great boss at Lincoln Labs, Al Goodeth, a very creative guy. At that time, we were building the memory system for SAGE System and DO Line. It involved hand wiring, XY drive and inhibit through  course, which was the memory of the computer. He had the idea that we could make an additive circuit, we could encapsulate the course and punch phenolic, protect it with selgar, the silicone material from Dow Chemical at the time. Metalize it, put Photoresist out, at that time was called Kodak Photoresist and expose XY drive and inhibit down through the holes on both flat surfaces by projection printing and then etch it and we did. Was a totally additive silver followed by electro copper, followed by electroplated copper. At that time the metalizer was done by something called the brochure process and was used to metalize buttons and other plastic objects at the time, and we adapted it to make a printed circuit. It worked so well that we actually demonstrated it on WGB HTV I think it was in 1957 or eight, public television

Zach Peterson:

If only there was footage of that's put on YouTube. That would be pretty interesting to see.

Gene Weiner:

It's long before YouTube.

Zach Peterson:

Oh, of course, of course. But it was broadcast on TV. I mean, that's still really interesting.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah, it was an interesting period. It was also the time of the first artwork was made at the time by hand taping on plastic and photo reducing it with a giant brown camera down, maybe 10 X photo reduction. And again, this Mr. Goodeth said, "Why can't we just, instead of photo reducing, just draw it with a head mill." He took a hypodermic needle, put a xenon point source at it and put it on the mill and programmed it to run the circuit onto Kodak negative photo resist film I should say, to form a mask. And then with the negative, we had a positive, and that was probably way long before Gerber and everybody else. I know it was before Dr. Gerber came along.

Zach Peterson:

Right. Yeah. Long before Ucamco.

Gene Weiner:

Oh, yes.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah.

Gene Weiner:

I remember when Ucamco bought the Gerber thing. Okay, sorry.

Zach Peterson:

No, that's fine. So I think at the time that was really cutting edge stuff in the '50s and then going into the '60s. What got you into it at that time? What caused you to go down that path?

Gene Weiner:

Well, a bit of good luck, I guess. I was going to be a physicist. I was captivated by the Millikan oil-drop experiment in intermediate physics and how this guy with really primitive equipment, could devise an experiment with mist and oil that would allow you to calculate the charge of a single electron and never missed. And I said, "Oh boy, this is for me." And then when I wound up at Lincoln Laboratories and I kept getting scholarships for chemistry and other things, so I wound up in the chem lab instead, I wound up making the print circuits. I was plating, I was etching, I was using photolithography.

Along came a guy named Charlie Shipley who formed the Shipley company who came from Farrington Industries and developed a product that allowed you to use electrons copper on a drilled border. Now G10 was coming along, epoxy glass at this point towards the end of that period, the late '50s, and metalize it without sand off the copper deposit. So in the old days, the copper would come down, was produced by Sierra Copper Cold or Atkinson. These were the two companies, but it didn't stick to the corporate cladding and he developed a colloidal catalyst at about the same time photo circuits developed one in house and it just changed the industry. I went up, I used it for two weeks, called them up, went over and asked for a job. I said, "This is going to change everything," and it did. And that moved me out of the laboratory into the printed circuit business.

Zach Peterson:

So what was the printed circuit business like at the time? I mean, this is after the war, it's still the '50s. I'm sure there's still a level of industrialization that's happening.

Gene Weiner:

It was. There were startups primarily in the Northeast with Electrolab and LFE in Boston. I remember Jim Penney and Tad at Electro Circuits up at Lowell. Photo Circuits down on Long Island. Stromberg Carlson came up. Then out on the west coast we had Autonetics, part of North American aviation. We had other shops starting up in Arizona was before Continental Circuit started San Diego Jetron Dynamics. It was IBM in Endicott, IBM at Poughkeepsie, there were a lot of captive operations. Motorola wound up getting five shops scattered around, including Phoenix, Arizona. I remember that one, 56 of McDowell as well as several in the greater Chicago area. So it was primarily captives and a few smaller individuals venturing into trying to make printed circuits, including two former presidents of the IPC. One was Peter Shamanian who wound up as a president of the IPC and Peter started in Roxbury, Massachusetts on the second floor of an old rickety building there.

He called me up one day, I was trying to get him to buy Shipley Electrons Copper, late '50s, '59, I think it was, 1959. And he says, "Do you have a drill?" I said, "What do you mean?" He says, "Well, I have to drill some holes to put some eyelets in these panels." I said, "I'm trying to teach you how to plate." He said, "You have a driller?" And I had a Sears Roebuck bench press, so I threw it in the back of my truck and drove it over. We took it up the freight elevator and eyeballed the holes, drilled the whole tooling holes and took the drill back home. That's how things were made those days.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, forget about CNC, it was all my hand.

Gene Weiner:

Well, the first ones had paper tapes that made a mess with the paper punching out as they run through them before we had programming, totally electronic. They punched tapes and ran it through the machine.

Zach Peterson:

That's so interesting, because I think we take for granted the level of automation that has progressed over that time period until today. And then if you look at processing as it's done today, at least here in North America, I don't even think we're at the same level where we should be if you look overseas in Asia.

Gene Weiner:

Well, what happened was, about 1975, the Japanese had come along, they were very aggressive. They had Dr. Demi teach them about quality in the automotive industry and the electronics industry picked it up very quickly and they were very creative. They developed advanced processes. IBM set up over there. They were so good, Hitachi and others, Sumitomo, and they were doing flexible stuff. They were doing rigid stuff and they kept it to themselves. They were developing processes, they were developing equipment, they were developing specialty chemicals.

At that time IBM went over there and they had a 44 layer board made in their shop in Japan, couldn't be made in the States. Then the people in Hong Kong were very aggressive, said, "Oh, we're going to get into this printed circuit thing." And they started up about 1975 and from there it went up into Taiwan and Singapore had some and some of the big guys in Taiwan when we were just out, in fact, Happy Holden, whom was one of your guests recently went over there for HP to teach a company, which later became Narnia, one of the world's largest, how to make printed circuits.

As a guy he trained Roundup just two or three years ago, retired as the vice president of Narnia for substrates for the advanced factory, which he built in mainland. Quite a change. But then as it progressed, Motorola pretty well submarined it's domestic forces set up over there. Then they developed a mezzanine buried capacitor board made at China. Then Intel wanted to have its substrates and boards made over there and they actually sent 40 engineers to Taiwan to improve the yields of compact and of Narnia so that they could meet the Intel standards. So they had said, in essence, taught them how to put a quality system into advanced boards or at that time advanced boards or 10 mil line and spaces and so forth. Not like today's, but it really was amazing and then everybody followed.

I remember talking to the purchasing manager of an outboard motor company. They built Mercury and the others there and they said, "What's this going on in China? All my friends at the club, other electronic guys are now buying the boards in China. Do you think I should?" I said, "I'd hate to see it. Are you interested in price or what? Because in China you're going to be dealing with new issues again, you're going to have a quality issue, you're going to have a time lag issue," and all that happened. But they learned pretty quickly and they came up. Taiwan got pretty good on quality. China came along afterwards, Chinese data reverse engineering everything, copying things. And as we shifted things overseas, a lot of Japanese guys weekended in China to teach them how to do things. Then Americans started getting hired over there and people just didn't want to pay the price for a quality domestic board when they could buy something and the major companies and IBM and HP all killed it for much cheaper price, much lower price. And it was price, price, price.

Zach Peterson:

You mentioned earlier that Motorola had captive operations and Happy had mentioned that HP had their captive operations and a lot of other companies had had captive operations. And when you then look overseas and you bring up like Narnia in Taiwan, and I'm sure we could run down a list of other names that were operating there at the time, it seems that there stopped being an interest in improving local or captive operations and just improving it overseas.

Gene Weiner:

Well, the OEMs at one time did an awful lot of research here. Motorola did, IBM, they did great jobs there. HP, General Dynamics, they all did great things. However, the cost was so attractive, the cost reduction that they just said, "Well, we'll do it and we don't have to do this." Then eventually the margins get squeezed. And so when the margins get squeezed, they didn't want bricks and mortar, they just wanted the intellectual property. Then eventually it's got squeezed so far they stopped doing the R&D and left it up to the guys building the boards and the supply chain, which were the specialty chemical guys and the laminate guys and equipment guys of course, they had software people.

So what were they left with? Eventually had ODM jobing out the design. I was involved in the board of a company where good number of our jobs were involved in. We were given a part and say, "Can you design and build this for us?" Not just build it to print, design and build. And that came along and then eventually some of it went to box built, but not that much yet.

Zach Peterson:

Well, I see two parallel themes here. One of them I think makes a lot of sense, which is that specialization in that type of service or that type of labor, which is specialization in manufacturing. Because before that, when everybody has a bunch of captive operations as individual companies make an advance, it's almost like everybody else has to come back and reinvent the wheel. So it kind of makes sense to have these contract services that are just good at manufacturing. But I think what's interesting is the fact that none of them were developed in the US. It all sprung up overseas and we've kind of been following ever since.

Gene Weiner:

Well, there was also a culture difference. The governments of Taiwan and of Hong Kong and of China created great incentives for the companies to go into this and invest in this and build this. And we created great taxes as they were creating incentives. And the government policies have been consistent. Very few regime change. Even when the government's changed in Taiwan, there were still the government sponsored R&D things to which companies could participate. And if they participated in the programs, they got a pretty cheap license to produce it in the country, for the country.

When companies went there, if I wanted to set up a factory in Hong Kong or in Taichung or something, I might be given five years tax-free. This happened in Kwun Chung in China. The mayor and the province down at Canton Province created tax-free benefits for so many years, which lured companies even from Taiwan to build their factories in mainland China to it's now substantial part of Taiwan's production, company's production is in China, but rapidly moving to Thailand and Indonesia now. I wish it moved to Mexico and Europe, but Thailand is a big recipient at the moment.

Zach Peterson:

So that's interesting that you bring up Latin America, because just recently we were talking with another guest, Case Anglin, and he's from Tetoma and they're a smaller manufacturer, but they work in Taiwan and China, but they also have a plant in Columbia. And so I was pretty surprised by that, because for a smaller company to go into Columbia I think is rare. But now a lot of companies are looking more at Latin America and specifically Mexico. And what do you think the momentum needs to be or what do you think needs to be done to maybe encourage companies to broaden the base a little bit into those other areas of the world?

Gene Weiner:

Well, I hate to say it, but the geopolitical situation and the cartel situation has to be sorted out before it's a big rush to Mexico. I think Mexico's ideal with the new US, Mexico, Canada alliance and the advantages that it provides to all three countries, particularly with the new joint thing announced by the president this week with Canada for printed circuits, Mexico is a prime target. Mexico is booming. Everyone thinks Guadalajara and the hundreds of companies there, there's more than that. There's an aerospace center called Querétaro in Querétaro Province, two million people, five or six universities, international airport, good security. A lot of the big players are there. Samsung aerospace companies are there. Even a Hong Kong owned company, which is a Bermuda corporation,  registered set up an EMS company there. EMS will probably be growing there and it's been growing five, six, 7% a year, but probably 18 to 20% a year in the next five years if they could get the political situation sorted out and get the cartels under control.

But even so, Querétaro and Guadalajara are safe. They're global centers. But what's missing, are printed circuit trucks, what are two or three in Mexico? You still have the 10th largest thing there. They still got to buy the boards from Asia or certainly not the US. We don't have the capacity. We no longer have the capacity. We have companies that can't even get people to quote on jobs in the US on conventional circuit boards, single, double-sided, four layer, six layer type things. But the next problem is water.

Zach Peterson:

Really?

Gene Weiner:

Fabrication requires a lot of water for plating, for rinsing, for etching, we need water. And Mexico's a dry country, it's an arid country and there's a water shortage. The solution to that's very simple, there are tens of thousands of desalinization factories, plants along the shore like near Guadalajara producing water for whole countries in 17, 18, 19 countries that can be licensed.

Every nuclear sub or aircraft carrier makes its own water for months and it's now a modern affordable technology. Plus with the developments on waste treatment and a processing by guys like Alex Dupenske who put in the green circuits up at Wayward up in New Hampshire, use much less water, you recycle a lot more and the waste is less. So I think Mexico, location wise, is a prime target. The fact the EMS business is already there waiting, we just need the bare boards and we have skilled labor there from the university is there from the 10, 20 years of EMS experience. It's a logical thing except for the politics and the cartels.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, it's centrally located too. I mean, you have shipping direct there from Asia, you have shipping to Asia, you have shipping to Europe. It seems like a logical place to have kind of a second global hub for electronics manufacturing that can serve a lot of different regions of the world. But also it is maybe a lower cost option for the United States or Canada to produce things that you could maybe say are not critical to national security or critical IP for big companies and things like that. So I think it makes a lot of sense.

Gene Weiner:

And especially since the semi-skilled labor force is available at the current time.

Zach Peterson:

That's another thing. I think in the US we get a little, I don't know, maybe pretentious about the labor force sometimes. And we don't realize that there is a lot of skilled labor or labor that can be trained up in some of these other countries-

Gene Weiner:

Yes, upskilled.

Zach Peterson:

... that can serve some of those needs.

Gene Weiner:

Yes, absolutely. Manufacturing seems to become a dirty word in America and with the IPC and other groups, were trying to educate the young people through STEM programs and the IPC chapters at various universities and colleges. And this year we had hundreds of kids attend the IPC in San Diego, young men and women. And they had a breakfast farm they termed and they were amazed at looking at the equipment running on the floor, high-tech stuff, software, artificial intelligence, machines talking to each other, handling parts and no people and the work is done. It's brain work now primarily.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah, I'm really hopeful that more of those types of events and seeing is believing will really push kids into a career in manufacturing. Because I have to be honest, when I was younger 20 years ago and I was in high school, I had a job at a local cookie factory. I like to talk about this sometimes, but I mean it was all manual. That was not a place you wanted to aspire to work in. And it created kind of this bad image that manufacturing is still a lot of manual labor, people sweating it out on the assembly lines and things like that. Manufacturing was two options like intel, which was super advanced, semiconductors and then everything else which was still stuck in the early-1900s or something like this.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah, you say when you were younger, Zach, you are younger, but it's all a matter of reference and from where you're standing. But again, we talk about the past, but let's look to the present and the future. There is so much going on now in automation, the use of artificial intelligence or simulation or rapid changes, the component shortages and problems caused by both COVID coupled with the geopolitical situation has caused people to say, "Hey, is there were another way of doing things and the use of artificial intelligence and as you know, as a designer know, is coming more and more into use of  component location, selection, determination, rerouting. And my son ran into this problem. He's with a company called Analog Devices and they ran into a supply problem on components. I said, "How did you solve it?" He says, "We redesigned the boards and it works for what we have to do."

He said, "Yeah, the boards were a little larger and we had to use a few more components, but we performed the function." But now we have another situation where the government is sponsoring and trying to incentivize more investment in chips with the CHIPS act here. And then the government just approved this week invoking a defense act to get boards made here. We still have to package the chips. The chips have to be packaged, they have to go on a substrate which has to go on a printed circuit. So if we make the chips here and the factories are done and these hundreds of billions are of dollars are invested, the government's only kicking in 52 billion. That would cover one modern chip factory today and have it producing in 3, 4, 5 years, if they get the equipment in by then. They still have to package it.

So they have to ship it to Asia to be packaged. And then where are the boards made? You still got to get them there. So what they're doing, unless they do the complete site supply chain right from start to finish, they're lengthening the supply chain by having the chips made here, shipped back to Asia, then shipped back here. So we need the complete package, we need the assembly here and we need the packaging here. We need the boards here, we need everything here. And by here, I don't say on-shoring, I say near-shoring. Some of the stuff can be done with allied countries, with countries such as Switzerland, Germany or England, Mexico, Canada, of course by treaty and even Israel, which has high-tech.

Zach Peterson:

Yeah. So to me it seems to make sense for broader sustainability and less risk in the supply chain to broaden that capability out across US, Latin America, Canada, Europe, and even other places in Southeast Asia.

Gene Weiner:

I think you're absolutely right. Just building chips in America without building the rest of the supply chain here just lengthens the supply chain. And we have two things that we need here. First, we need the packaging in the United States. I just noticed in the news this past month at MKS Instruments, which owns Atotech, set up a complete laboratory with lasers and equipment and tools and design capabilities for doing additively manufactured substrates, the ABF, the builder film for its 8,000 customers worldwide. I sure wish they had built it in the US and I wonder what kind of incentives there were. Probably incentives were that everyone that does that, is in Southeast Asia and is using a Japanese material. We need that in the United States. So we need a change in government to be more consistent to incentivize the private industry to invest in that.

Because if you don't build it, they're not going to come. And you have to have an incentive. If you have to have volume, demand, you have to need a certain amount of return for a private company to invest in it. So we absolutely need this in the United States, and I hope we can get maybe a tax benefit or some other thing with a friendly company that has this technology. We no longer have the technology here, but an American owned company in Japan has that technology and they should somehow want to bring it here.

Now one of the differences is, how can we get a consistent government program to continue to incentivize this so that we have a secure private manufacturing facility or capability that is not at risk for not just for the defense, but for medical, for communications, for production, for everything we need here. Probably we needed five to six times the demand we currently have of boards and capability. Because right now we're doing about 4 billion a year in the US. The demand to build the factories and equipment to do all this would most likely be 25 billion or more. Don't forget the world market, it's 80 plus billion.

Zach Peterson:

Okay. I mean, that's a very large market for sure. I wouldn't have expected that the amount of market that we just need domestically to even justify would need to be so large.

Gene Weiner:

Well, it may not be. That's the way I would like to see it. I'll put it that way.

Zach Peterson:

Okay. I mean, I can get behind that.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah. That would take us back up to about, at that time, five years out to maybe 25% of the world market.

Zach Peterson:

But is this a case of if you build it, the demand will come? Or are these companies that need to invest in that capability and build it up, are they always chasing the demand? Meaning the demand has to be here first?

Gene Weiner:

Well, this is where the government intervention or government incentive comes in. The demand was not there when they built a huge factories in China and Taiwan. They built it on the come. Now let's say you're running a company and you want to build a substrate factory and it's going to take a $100 million in equipment. You have to wait two or three years for the equipment. You've got five other competitors already there or trying to set up, what will your stockholders or money people say. How patient are your investors in America?

Zach Peterson:

I mean, depends if the company is private or public.

Gene Weiner:

It doesn't matter, private or public. It's not government-

Zach Peterson:

I think it does a little bit.

Gene Weiner:

Would you buy stock on a company that's risking a $100 million for one factory on the come knowing that they're four or five competitors out there trying to do the same thing or are located in Indonesia or Thailand that are cutting their price or in Switzerland?

Yeah. We need a tax benefit, we need an incentive. We need something that keeps them going. Such as with the CHIP tax. If you buy America and you get a 15 or 20% tax reduction, that's permanent, that's long range, that's an incentive.

Zach Peterson:

But now we're just copying the subsidies that got these other countries to the point where they're at now. And the demand, at least from the consumer side in Asia, is so weak compared to the US, Europe, and western nations that they have to subsidize what they do in those countries in order to meet that overseas demand. They're not going to get anywhere just off of domestic demand. Those subsidies are really helping to propel those companies to the point where they can produce enough for overseas markets.

Gene Weiner:

And it keeps unemployment lines low and it keeps people working. And there are a lot of ways to incentivize this and do it, but if you build it, will they come? Remember the baseball picture? If you build it, they may not come. You have to have some incentive. And I think there has to be a major incentive on the R&D site. For example, with 3G additive manufacturing, the use of AI and designer manufacturer, the development of new materials, new methods of putting it together.

There was a new method that just was announced that will allow the production of a two nanometer chip. I forget who did it, somebody just announced. I saw it in the press yesterday. The R&D I think should get more, we used to have good R&D incentives. I think we should bring them back and then some, because if you play catch up, you don't catch up. While you're trying to catch up, the competition moves ahead. So you have to try and move ahead while you're shoring up your base while you move ahead for the future.

Zach Peterson:

Well, it seems to me that companies that want to get into this business need to do what maybe Narnia did in the '80s, which is hire all of those folks from overseas as consultants and have them bring that knowledge over and hire them to build up a printed circuit or a substrate factory.

Gene Weiner:

China just announced the deputy minister of China, the covered situation that they will treat foreign technology people like natives if they come and help them with the chip business. This was announced just a couple of weeks ago. I'm not too sure that's the answer. That means money is king, money talks and money buys everything and that's not always the case. There are other ways to incentivize people and companies.

Zach Peterson:

So what are those other ways to incentivize people and companies aside from... I mean, because if you just do subsidies, money is still king, isn't it?

Gene Weiner:

To a point, yes. But try to hire a young person today, steal them away from another company and say, "Well, I'm not going to give you seven weeks vacation, but I'll give you a dollar an hour or more. That's money. I'll give you $2 an hour or more. But you can't have a vacation, $3," won't work. You have to have other things that go with it.

Zach Peterson:

That's fair. That's fair. Especially with the workforce. And at least here in the US the workforce issue is so pervasive. I mean, it's like we've lost an entire generation to the software world. And I'm not saying software companies don't deserve to have talent, but it seems that for the past 20 years, they've gotten so many people and there's been this hollowing out of the electronics engineering and design talent and-

Gene Weiner:

Well, rather than just hire people, there's a word called partnering. How about joining with and partnering where both sides benefit. If you can develop a mutual expectation, you'll have a success, but you have to have a mutual expectation on both sides or three sides. And I think partnering is going to become a must, whether it be nations or companies more than it has in the past.

Zach Peterson:

These are all great points. I mean, I'm interested to see how the policy situation and the business models start to change as the ball starts to roll downhill to bring some of these more advanced capabilities closer to home.

Gene Weiner:

Well, remember, partnering shares the risk, reduces the risk for any one company or person.

Zach Peterson:

Sure. That's fair. I can see that.

Gene Weiner:

You asked how to reduce the risk. That's one way.

Zach Peterson:

That's a great point. Yeah. Well, and I think that's probably where public policy plays a role and we're seeing that now with the national, I think it's Semiconductor Research Center or something like this, I forget the name, but there's a research center that's being built up through chip sack funding that is doing exactly this kind of R&D and having government risk the bill on it. And maybe we could see the same thing in packaging and even some of the more advanced printed circuit capabilities.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah, there were a couple of companies on the totally additive manufacturing thing. As I said, the IPC put out a call for three different committees for this just this past week to form them. And there's several at the IPC show, 1, 2, 3, 4 companies displayed additive manufacturing processes in part or complete. And one of them is headquartered and developed in New York. And I'm not going to mention the name here, because they'll be rushing and they may not be ready, but they've already placed a large platform into one of our remaining larger printed circuit companies for development for totally additive stuff, at least for R&D. And people say, "Oh, I heard of this company from Israel. I heard of that company from Israel, heard of this company in Japan. Fuji introduced the system in Holland at a trade show several months ago," but we got some right here at the US.

Zach Peterson:

Well, I think as these capabilities start to develop, it's going to be a very interesting time for domestic manufacturing and we'd love to have you come back on and discuss it more.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah, I think so. I'm looking forward to it. If I can get another 60 years in, it'd be great.

Zach Peterson:

Well, let's hope so. Let's hope so. I mean, your experience is so valuable and it would be great to see how this all develops.

Gene Weiner:

Yeah, I hope so. And you can send me a message on the other side when you're my age.

Zach Peterson:

Thank you very much.

We're going to have to wrap it up there. To everyone that's been listening or watching on YouTube, we've been talking with Gene Weiner of Weiner International Associates. If you're watching on YouTube, make sure to hit the subscribe button. Of course, leave your comments and you can keep up with all of our tutorials and podcast episodes as they come out. Last but not least, don't stop learning, stay on track and we'll see you next time.