Really? I didn’t know that!

All companies have been told to stay closed post the V=Lunar New Year celebration until at least February 9.

The March 16-18 CPCA/HKPCA event has been postponed.

I expect the March SEMICON CHINA (Shanghai event to also announce a “delay”.

This will be a boon for the Taiwan, Vietnam, Thai, Mexican and AMERICAN members in our business that have managed to scramble and cover their near term supply chains.

Loner viewpoint is cloudy but should be good for the U.S. if investors take a longer viewpoint, especially if Washington takes a strong suppoiortive role (a pipedream?)!

Other than specialty materials the US has NOT one laminate manufacture.
The last domestic laminate Norplex Oak / G.E. abandoned the US in favor of profits from Asia.

There is not ONE domestic manufacture of Inks and resists for PCBs. All inks have been purchased and distributed by Di Nippon Ink and Chemicals. This includes Taiyo and Sun. All resins are manufactured in several Asian Counties. This is due to costs and profits.

Other than a hand full of chemical companies there is a limited source for Electronic Grade Chemistry.

It is not surprising that ALL of our top PCB manufactures have been purchased by Asian Companies. There was a promise that they would not close facilities after purchase. We are facing a growing strangulation of legitimate PCB . facilities.

I blame some of this on buyers that continue to source off shore without giving a bid to domestic manufactures. We need to circle our wagons and give the proper respect to the true heroes of our industry. The owners of our FEW PCB manufactures. Please remember that in the 80s there were over 5000 pcb shops in N. America. The current number of active shops is less the 500 and of the 500 several are brokers and have no manufacturing facilities in N. America. Buyers purchase from a Web Site.

The fact is that while India has done a great job building several major PCB facilities they cannot compete with the Asian Pricing Schedules.

I am of the opinion that it would take BILLIONS of dollars and many years to resurrect our industry. We lost our industry due to greed and crooked dealings. We cannot rely on our Government to assist in our crisis. There are many calls to congress and officials in high placed arenas to look into our industry demise. It is like whistling in the wind.

Thank you all for letting me vent my frustrations ..Please use this note as a reminder that WE can compete in the US. Lets keep our industry strong and vital.

@Felix – For some reason my CAD software was defaulting to exponential notation for capacitors so a 0.1uf is shown as 1e-07F. I can change them individually, but haven’t yet dug around to see how to change the default notation.

Also I like placing pin headers with the headers at the border and the conductors pointing in. If you slide the chip pins around on the chip, you can connect the header pins directly to the chip and avoid searching for the net labels. This does mean you do have a multiplicity of symbols for the same chip in your library.

BTW Farads?