Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

It's Only Common Sense: Claim the Glory

Editor's Note: To listen to Dan's weekly column, as you've always done in the past, click here. For the written transcript, keep reading...The North American PCB industry has never taken its fair share of the glory; never claimed all the good they have done in the past 60+ years. Instead, as an industry, we have been pushed and shoved and twisted to a point where we have almost broken.

Our customers have not done us any favors either, famously taking our technology to cheaper pastures so they can increase profits while flagrantly stealing technology, innovation, and ingenuity--giving it away to any locale offering boards at sweat shop wages.

The old IPC (I say the old IPC out of hopeful respect of the new IPC) would not even consider advertising our industry, similar to the cotton and the dairy industries. When I brought this up to the previous IPC director he scoffed and said he had talked to the director of the dairy industry who told him that the “Got milk?” ads were not working; a fact I found to be completely false after further research. This is the same IPC director who took a government grant to translate IPC specifications into Mandarin! How did that help the North American PCB industry?

Certainly it behooves our customers to put the industry down--especially contract manufacturers who want to buy boards as cheaply as possible--to commoditize our products as much as possible.

Why are we still taking this treatment? Why aren’t we doing something about it? Why do we continue to behave like abused children who somehow feel they are responsible for the abuse?

Let’s lay out the facts: The Western world (including Europe) developed the PCB. We had the first independent circuit board companies; we created the entire industry and created IPC many years ago for the sake of creating a brand called the PCB. But, along the way, we let in the vendors, the customers, and the assembly companies and that’s when we were shoved into fourth place by these entities. That’s when they started calling our high-technology products “cards;” that’s when they started completely suffocating this industry with their self-serving ideas and concepts.

The vendors, in cahoots with our customers, crammed a number of products down our throats--whether we wanted them or not. Later, our customers pushed us to develop new technologies, urging us to make serious cash investments so that we could build these new technologies by promising us a prosperous future filled with large orders and endless backlogs. What really happened was the transfer of our technologies to new sweat shop labor companies in Asia.

Let’s never forget that we developed this business and this industry. We had the first factories; we developed the equipment and the support systems; we led this industry for years before our customers and vendors sold us out to the low-priced spread substituting an appreciation of value for the lure of their own profits regardless of the devastation they were wreaking on an industry they could not do without.

Think of the world without the European and North American PCB industry. You’ll come to realize that without it, man would never have gone to the moon; the Viking would never have gone to Mars; and the shuttle would never have flown. We would not have MRI’s or those little pill cameras; there would be no video games, DVDs, or anything else digital; we would never have achieved the level of security we have today; we would probably never have seen the Berlin wall come down; and iPhones would not exist.

The world has changed for the better in the last few decades and the PCB has played an integral role in that change. I think it’s time that this be recognized. To the 265 companies left in North America and the 200 or so left in Europe, I would like to say thank you for a job well done. Thank you for your perseverance; thank you for hanging on against incredible odds. You are the true unsung heroes of the global electronics community. You have done much more than your fair share with the smallest amount of recognition If this column does nothing else, let it give you one small fraction of the recognition you have earned and deserve.

Bravo…it’s only common sense.