EIPC Summer Conference 2026: AI, Robots, and Historic Vilnius, Lithuania

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

Historic downtown Vilnius, Lithuania, hosted the sold-out EIPC Summer Conference, June 9–10, where 175 participants gathered at the AC Hotel, including representatives from the Global Electronics Association, FED, and four other industry associations. This year also included representation from 14 European PCB companies, and one—TTM— from the U.S., something that hasn’t happened for quite some time.

Among those notable companies gracing the roster were Eurocircuits from Hungary and Germany, Schweitzer and Wurth from Germany, Thales from the Netherlands, Aspocomp from Finland, ACB from Belgium, and TTM, based in the United States. In all, there were 14 presentations and several panel sessions.

Vilnius has certainly been on my bucket list of travel destinations, but an invitation to attend the EIPC Summer Conference afforded me the opportunity earlier than I expected. I was fascinated to learn that Vilnius is a UNESCO Heritage Site due to an impressive collection of historic Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and classic architecture, which has had a significant cultural and architectural influence on much of Eastern Europe. On a lighter note, it is also considered the hot air balloon capital of Europe.

A popular part of attending every seasonal EIPC conference is the field trip that inevitably happens at the end of the first day. Recent conference excursions have taken attendees on tours of Schweitzer Electronic and CircuitFoil, and even to an historic Scottish whiskey distillery in Edinburgh last summer. The highlight this time was a tour of TLT PCB, Teltonika’s new, state-of-the-art Lithuanian PCB factory in Vilnius. It is the first significant PCB investment to happen in Europe in 20 years. The large campus in High-Tech Hill Park features four factories, dedicated to PCB manufacturing, assembly, plastic injection molding, and semiconductor substrates. This was, no doubt, a draw to the PCB fabricators in attendance. I will publish more on that later.

The theme for the conference was “AI and Robotics Integration in PCB Manufacturing,” and Tuesday’s sessions featured EIPC leadership and three robotic guests, all playing a prominent role in the festivities. EIPC President Rico Schluter gave the opening remarks, at the facility tour at the end of the day, our robot friends—including a robot dog—joined in on the experience.

“People are saying that the PCB industry doesn’t have a chance, that it’s all about technology,” Schluter said. “I disagree. It is also about scale and supply chain.” Happy to showcase the TLT Teltonika PCB factory later that day, of which he was an integral part, Schluter said that there will be four new PCB factories built in Europe over the next few years, all of which will be vertically integrated. “As president of EIPC, every PCB company is important,” he said.

He also took a moment to highlight the criticality of the pending PFAS restrictions and the collaborative work of the EU and the World Electronics Circuits Council in applying for a 20-year derogation for compliance and implored attendees to be involved and remain vigilant on the issues that will deeply affect our industry and our businesses.

Then he got to the core of the conference: AI and robotics. He took us through a flurry of AI images representing nearly every area of our lives and businesses, from the original GPS devices popular in the early 2000s to humanoid robots that are more human-looking every day. He talked about “dark” factories in China where, with no human employees, there isn’t a need for lights, heat or air conditioning. He explained that the AI and technology arcs are illustrated in the microchip journey as the CPU has become the GPU and will soon become the QPU, a quantum processing unit developed to execute quantum algorithms based on the tenets of quantum mechanics.

Formal presentations centered on the global and European business outlooks for electronics, and PCB and EMS, specifically. Data was presented by John Custer from Custer Consulting, followed by Dieter Weiss of in4ma, who both touted great growth for the global PCB industry at $106.1 billion, with Custer sharing a comment by Dr. Hayao Nakahara: “For every dollar of semiconductor, 12 cents of PCB is necessary to interconnect semiconductor chips.”  That is, indeed, a lot of PCBs.

But there was also clear acknowledgement that Europe’s slice of this pie is small: 169 PCB factories and 237 EMEA or assembly shops (by some counts). These are under threat of diminishing further if the Chips Act 2.0 is not successful at inspiring much-needed domestic growth. Fittingly, Alison James, senior director of the Global Electronics Association’s European advocacy efforts, gave a presentation on the recent announcement on the EU’s Chips Act 2.0 that PCBs and substrates are now specifically called out to receive government funding to secure the European supply chain.

By 10 a.m., we had already covered a lot of ground, and I immensely appreciated the coffee break, having flown from Arizona into Vilnius just the day before. The rest of the morning and the afternoon went quickly, and soon we were on our way to tour TLT PCB. I look forward to bringing more information about the presentations and the tour itself in my next article covering the conference.