Are you tapping all the opportunities in your labor market?

For US electronics manufacturing services (EMS) providers, the only thing in shorter supply than long lead-time components is labor. Decades of manufacturing job losses translate to a generation of workers who don't consider manufacturing jobs because they don't know anyone in manufacturing. EMS companies are addressing this in multiple ways including job enlargement for existing workers, greater use of automation and closer ties with community colleges. Flexible work schedules better aligned with college student or single-parent schedule preferences have also been successful tactics. In areas with large retired populations, flexible work schedules may also appeal to retirees who are feeling inflationary pressures to re-enter the workforce and want better compensation than found in retail.

The road to resilience for Western manufacturing must begin with small steps.

For more than three decades, leading electronics brands in the West have enshrined leanness, maximum efficiency and lowest cost. The drive to outsource manufacturing to areas where labor costs are lowest has enabled the industry to deliver more advanced electronic products at relatively affordable prices.

It has made perfect sense for the world's OEMs, relieving demand for capital investment and helping to cut costs while giving access to cutting-edge processes and providing rapid, low-risk scalability. The trend to outsource began in the late 1970s and became the dominant model in the '80s and '90s. Throughout the 21st century, this has been the way to operate a competitive supply chain. Now, the largest EMS operations are based in China and Southeast Asia and the sector is currently worth about $800 billion. It's still growing at more than 7% compounded annually.

But something else happened during this transformation. As production migrated geographically, the essential skills associated with designing and making advanced electronics products also moved away from the OEMs and became concentrated in Asia. Many associated industries also moved out. In the 1980s there were 23 full-scale manufacturers of substrate base materials in Europe. Currently, there are two. Similarly, the number of manufacturers of glass and copper foil has fallen from 12 to just one.

Seemingly small issues can have big print implications.

Most reading this column are probably familiar with "The Princess and the Pea" fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, wherein a tiny pea under 20 mattresses keeps a true princess from a good night's sleep. Similarly, in the stencil printing process, seemingly small settings or interferences can prevent a good print outcome – particularly as assemblies continue to move toward higher densities and miniaturization. Our team had such a scenario recently while troubleshooting the cause for incomplete deposits on a complex board assembly.

This project involved printing on ultra-thin substrates – approximately 400µm thick. That's about the thickness of a playing card, so very, very thin, which makes for challenging print stability. Moreover, the panel was on the larger side, about 400mm x 400mm made up of multiple PCBs with no routing, making it more difficult to ensure coplanarity during printing. Tooling stability is always critical and even more challenging with very thin substrates. Today's tooling support solutions number a handful of options: Equipment standard tooling pins, reconfigurable pin systems like Grid-Lok, smart automatic pin placement, and dedicated tooling blocks with and without vacuum. Given the size and thickness of this substrate, our team used dedicated tooling blocks with vacuum to offer the most robust support for the process analysis.

Proper fab specs can prevent a deluge of engineering questions.

I have been selling bare printed circuit boards for over 30 years to a variety of customers who order a wide selection of PCBs. The most common complaint I hear from board buyers is about the number of engineering questions (EQs) asked whenever a new order is placed, or when a part number is moved from one supplier to another.

"Why can't you build the boards without all these questions?" they ask. "We sent you the working files!"

To many buyers, the inevitable EQs that come along with moving a PCB order to a more cost-effective supplier seem daunting. Sure, the new pricing may be great, but many PCB buyers will delay switching to a new supplier because they don't want to deal with engineering questions from the new fabricator.