Comment by crote

Comment by crote 10 months ago

5 replies

> US manufacturing is about to be reinvigorated, and we in the US are going to be building our own future both for chips and for energy security.

Don't count on it. For every high-end chip you need hundreds of commodity parts to support them, and nobody is investing in US factories to make $0.001 capacitors or $0.10 connectors. You just can't compete with cheap Chinese labor, so the US supply lines will never be able to equal a city like Shenzhen.

Unless the US is willing to get rid of capitalism and switch to a plan economy, most of those expensive high-end chips will just be shipped to Asia for assembly. So much for building your own future.

sgu999 10 months ago

> most of those expensive high-end chips will just be shipped to Asia for assembly

I get the first part of your comment, but why wouldn't all the missing components be imported for assembly in the US? SMT lines in particular don't need that much cheap labour to operate. Even Brits can assemble PCBs!

  • crote 10 months ago

    Either you ship one component to Asia where it'll be combined with thousands of parts made by factories literally in the same city, or you're shipping all those thousands of parts over the US for assembly. Even with zero labor cost for assembly it's not hard to guess which option is cheaper and easier to manage.

swalsh 10 months ago

"You just can't compete with cheap Chinese labor"

You sure can, we have cheap Mexican labor... and we have a much healthier trade relationship with Mexico.

themaninthedark 10 months ago

Or how about instead of 0.001 caps and 0.10 connectors we pay the little bit extra and not sacrifice living wages and environmental regulations?

You don't need a planned economy to legislate that all of you source material must be produced in accordance to local laws.

mike50 10 months ago

Those components are not used in military products. Specialized vendors manufacture passives for the military. AVX, CDE and Vishay are just the first three I recall.