Nearly 15 years have passed since Solyndra went out of business, but its specter hangs over the US government to this day as a warning of the risk of federal intrusion in a capitalist world.

Solyndra, of course, represented the US’s attempt to bolster the sustainable energy industry, specifically solar. The intentions were noble: solar was seen as a safe respite from combustible sources like oil and natural gas, which are expensive, nonrenewable and dirty.

But corruption and mismanagement conspired to drain its coffers. The resulting bankruptcy ultimately cost taxpayers more than $500 million in unreimbursed loans.

The financial hit, however, was nothing compared to the surgical job it did on the collective congressional spine. “Strategic investments” became a fool’s term, something you said if you wanted to be primaried.

Consider the landscape today. The debate over critical industries is negligible. Forget a national roadmap. Yes, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, maintains a list of critical industries, but it’s hard to take seriously any plan that neglects electronics in general and semiconductors in particular.

The absence of electronics in this mix is particularly acute because it is fundamental to almost every industry identified by CISA, be it defense, energy or even public health. And while perhaps as a horizontal industry its standing is diminished, sectors such as chemicals manage to rate, which suggests that electronics is simply being overlooked.

All of this is crystallized in a recent editorial by Michael Dunne, an automotive executive who oversaw General Motors’ entry into China in the 1990s. Dunne notes the rapid ascent of Chinese automakers, whose output scaled from knockoffs and clunkers to state-of-the-art electrics vehicles in barely 20 years.

Says Dunne: “We need the courage to recognize how badly we are falling behind, shake off complacency and adopt an urgent government-led effort – think of a Manhattan Project but for cars – to restore US competitiveness.”

I agree, but automotive is just one piece of the picture. Every first-world nation – and most others as well – shares similar domestic concerns: energy, communications, logistics and healthcare. But they can’t solve those issues in-house, let alone become profitable technology exporters, if they lack the basic infrastructure, including world-class manufacturing and resilient supply chains.

Yet as David Schild of the Printed Circuit Board Association of America noted recently on the PCB Chat podcast, the latest draft of the fiscal 2026 defense bill lacks funding for US-based PCB producers, reversing the trend of the past few years when roughly $100 million was doled out to help steady the supply base. Given that each of the top handful of the largest fabricators in the world is now more or less larger than the entire US bare board industry, TTM notwithstanding, that’s a big miss, in my opinion. The industry needs a boost that only a well-thought-out industrial policy can provide.

Best practices from a governmental standpoint are to determine how to approach these issues through classical modes of definition and debate. In other words, Congress needs to, you know, congress. As a start, our leaders must overcome their fear of failure.

As a Boston Celtics fan, it pains me to quote Michael Jordan, but his famous statement on overcoming adversity rings true: “I failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” Institutionalized risk-taking is the Silicon Valley mentality. In Washington, by contrast, politicizing failure seems part of the job description. That must change.

As the saying goes, the only ones who never fail are those who never try. To that, I add the Buetow postulate: Those who never try have already failed.

Managers wanted. Speaking of resilient business strategies, I’ll plug the debut of the PCB Management Forum at PCB West this fall. This new, all-day executive program will feature expert-led discussions on automation, managing businesses under fast-changing market conditions, PCB facility development, materials procurement challenges and more.

Attendees will gain valuable insights into risk mitigation and navigating supply chain complexities in an era of evolving trade policies and technological advancements.

The PCB Management Forum takes place Sept. 30, as part of PCB West, which will be held Sept. 30 to Oct. 3, 2025, at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center. Hope to see you there!

Mike Buetow is president of PCEA (pcea.net); mike@pcea.net.

The question was put forth at Siemens’ EDA Tech Day in May: Which of the following can be replaced by AI?

• Input
• Schematic
• Footprints
• Placement
• Routing
• Deliverables (DfM, validation, etc.).

It was posed by a user who indicated that routing takes up about 30% of the time of a typical design spin. In classical Pareto thinking, that makes it the best target for process improvement.

Among the many surprises at PCB East this spring was the appearance of a pair of scientists from a semi-obscure (to we laypeople) government contractor called, obliquely, JLab.

JLab is shorthand for Jefferson Lab, or its official name, the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (TJNAF). The facility is operated on behalf of the US Department of Energy, which has a budget larger than Jabil or Flex, and oversees, among other things, the US nuclear arsenal.

Now, in the event you haven’t been paying attention, the US government has been in the media kind of often of late, for reasons too numerous for this page to detail. But one big newsworthy item has been the administration’s efforts to change the federal government’s budget priorities.

Certainly, most readers are familiar by now with the Chips Act, the overarching legislation passed in fall 2022 that authorized more than $50 billion in direct spending and tax incentives to rally North American semiconductor production. It was perhaps the most significant government-led mandate since the European Union ratified the Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive (RoHS).

And most are also aware of a similar, albeit smaller, bill to bolster domestic printed circuit board and IC substrate production that has been proposed in Congress but has yet to make it out of committee. (The latest version, called the Protecting Circuit Boards and Substrate Act, was introduced in late May.)

Far beyond the headlines, the team representing Jefferson Lab is working on an AI solution for the manufacturing side of the PCB industry. Which is how we came to find team members Dr. Thomas Britton and Dr. Nataliia Matsiuk walking the show floor at PCB East, talking with PCB manufacturers as part of a DoE academic program that aims to get scientists out of the labs to learn what problems the industry faces.

As Britton explains on a recent podcast we did, he and Matsiuk are technologists and problem-solvers out to provide tailored solutions applicable to the industry at large. What they need in return is for manufacturers to explain what their problems are.

“A lot of value is sitting above the manufacturing process,” Britton says, referring both to inaccessible collected data and missed opportunities to collect other useful data. “Can we make something adaptive and reactive utilizing that data coming from the manufacturing line?”

“There’s a lot of data being produced,” he elaborates. “It’s very complicated, lots of steps.” The DoE program seeks to take the data from those steps, aggregate it and use it to better assess the manufacturing process holistically, he says, getting in front of potential variances as opposed to, “ ‘Oh, what, there’s a problem here?’ ”

Clearly there is (or was) government momentum to support critical industries. While the Chips Act and Boards Bill are still trying to execute on their lofty goals, the DoE has been honing its craft for years.

The subtle gem of the DoE is it is already taxpayer funded. The crucial lever, then, isn't money – but communication.

“We’re doing things to help our science. And we’re funded from taxpayer dollars through the DoE to do the work we do,” he says.

One program, for instance, was for machine vision, which sought to replace shift workers with AI solutions.

“We’re looking at deep learning and those kinds of solutions,” says Britton. “One thing that I’ve heard of that’s a roadblock for a lot of factories, at least in the US, to develop this smart factory, is to be able to communicate with the AI systems. [Manufacturers] don’t have equipment that’s capable of reporting and communicating this [data].

“What we’ve found is Asia is very well-instrumented. Around [the US], legacy machinery maybe isn’t collecting the data. They didn’t know it would be valuable. We see PCB as a beachhead to prove out the technology because you have similar challenges, especially with substrate-like manufacturing techniques that are coming up.”

As part of their commercialization strategy, the DoE is considering an open AI model in which its researchers partner with a private manufacturer, and the improvements in the line outputs make up the proof of concept.

“I think it’s going to take a lot of partnerships between the lab, the researchers and industry partners to really dig into the data that is held so close to the chest for a variety of reasons.

“You take the knowledge you gain at one company and to go to the next one. And you are transferring that knowledge – just like an employee working at one firm and then moving to a different firm – without exposing the secrets of any party involved to enhance the manufacturing across the line,” Britton says.

“I think, right now, our top hypothesis is that you would do it through embedding with viable partners willing to give you the data, work with you, devote the time and then hopefully it would be made commercially available.”

Fabricators have often privately groused that the US government can be a roadblock to success. Will they take the opportunity to clear that path now that they know it’s available?

Mike Buetow is president of PCEA (pcea.net); mike@pcea.net.

It’s not often you get the chance to talk shop with Hayao Nakahara, Gene Weiner, Tom Kastner and David Schild. When you do, you’re best off sitting back and listening.

That was the order of the day during the PCB East conference last month. Under the auspices of another media group, I was asked to moderate a panel on the future of PCB manufacturing in North America. And while journalists are often thought of as the seers of the industry, we are, in fact, more purveyors of others’ insights, versus prognosticators in our own right.