If you order a small batch of custom PCBs with a five day turnaround from a fab house in the USA it costs over $500. If you order it from China they cost $15.
And it's not just due to cheaper labor. They have better higher volume equipment.
Edit: I’d love to find a non-state source but China claims $5T per year in manufacturing output for 2021. I wonder where the US would be if we had focused on manufacturing growth instead of offshoring production.
http://english.scio.gov.cn/m/pressroom/2022-03/01/content_78...
Given the extreme efficiency of international shipping logistics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect any given metro area to have competitive world class manufacturing of every type. The cost of real estate alone makes it hard to compete.
Quote for 100 boards (ENIG) on Bay Area Circuits, 10 days lead time, excluding shipping: $1000 ($1244 for 5 days lead time)
Todays quote for exact same 100 boards (ENIG) on pcbway.com, _including_ DHL shipping cost, 2 days lead time: $148 (shipping to Bay Area is usually 2 days with DHL, so really 4 days lead time). I've never had any quality issues and my boards have fine pitch 0.4mm BGA parts.
Yeah no, not even close. Certainly not marginally higher.
It's slightly cheaper than oshpark.com, they want $15 a board.
Together we prototyped a product over a 2 month period, him handling the HW and EE bits and me writing the board firmware and HIL simulator/test-harness.
We would get some boards, he would find and correct any issues with the board, get a new file to the board house before 5pm and we would get new boards in the morning at 9am delivered by a motorbike courier for about $20 or something. As a software guy that seemed pretty insane to me.
All up we probably did about 6 or 7 HW revisions like that and a few of those probably could have been avoidable if more care was taken but why would we when it's so cheap to iterate so quickly?
Unfortunately for various reasons we didn't choose to continue the project but I learnt a hell of a lot and really enjoyed hanging in Shenzhen and getting to understand the hacker culture there a bit more. We burnt overall a pretty small amount of money to learn some important lessons that I think would have been much more expensive anywhere else in the world.
If you every write more about it, please post a link here in HN, I'm sure tons of people would be interested in more details about the what, why, how of what you were doing, and life in Shenzhen.
China is dramatically cheaper than domestic.
If it wasn't for the DoD requiring all military parts be domestically manufactured, there probably wouldn't be a board house (or metal fab) left in the US.
As far as PCB fab or PCBA quality issues, I’m unable to think of any problems I’ve had across 15+ orders over the last three years. I just got another two PCBA jobs back in the last couple weeks and they were great.
I’m honestly in awe of what JLCPCB does and it’s a big inspiration to me for how much better things could be in the USA if we were committed to manufacturing.
> The Universal Postal Union set up a fee so richer countries would pay more to have their international mail delivered than countries with developing economies.
> "The central idea is that any citizen or business should be able to send mail packages through the Global Postal Network to any destination," said Schoorl.
> At the time, China was considered a country with a developing economy, meaning the country would be charged less for international mail than other countries. And that went unchanged for decades.
> As e-commerce took off in the 2010s, China found itself with a major competitive advantage. It could ship to North America at a cheap rate. Canada Post and the U.S. Postal Service were delivering packages and not being compensated very well, says Schoorl.
* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/shipping-canada-china-...
> China is still considered a “transitional” country by the UPU, which means it enjoys a lower rate for sending mail to a developed nation like the US. As a result, mail services from China to the US cost less than Americans are charged by their own postal service for a comparable domestic delivery. This gives Chinese sellers a competitive edge over American sellers, especially in e-commerce platforms like eBay or Amazon, where shipping cost is a major factor for buyers.
* https://medium.com/@contact_53404/why-is-it-so-cheap-to-ship...
It shouldn't be cheaper to ship something from China than from the next town over.
Then to paper over the losses of having to carry that massively underpriced mail from China, local deliveries have to increase in cost.
And I’m not saying “every metro should have competitive world class manufacturing of every type”, which is such a strong claim as to feel strawman-ish (but I get the sense you didn’t mean to do so). I do however deeply wish we had Shenzhen-like manufacturing hubs on the east and west coasts.
There is of course a large labour cost delta and probably a skills shortage in the US that might be an obstacle for making something like this be economically sustainable/competitive - but if it could be automated sufficiently so that labour cost is less of an issue, is this even feasible in theory?
I know there are some fabs being built, but beyond that is some kind of broader electronics manufacturing hub in the US conceivable?
From the article it sounds like the manufacturing is staying in Asia but moving to politically allied countries where new infra is being built for this. Is it still mainly a labour cost issue?
My complaint is that domestic board houses are super expensive, so I meant competitive with Chinese production. The person replying to me above said they are "marginally more expensive" but another commenter here went through the full quoting process and got a price that is about 8x higher than a reputable fab in China, which is not "marginally more expensive".
So why go domestic? For us, there were IP concerns (that we'd already seen with non-electronic products), there were concerns about shipments getting held up in customs, and there were concerns about manufacturing support. If you want boards to be flashed and tested at the factory, so you can dropship your assembled product to whatever its final destination, its very valuable to send somebody to the board house to work with their integration engineers to do it. I ended up spending most of a week commuting to a board house in Fremont in 2021, so I could train up their people on operating the programming and testing jig we'd built, and operating the calibration system we'd built. Driving from my home (at the time) in Oakland to Fremont was much much easier than flying to Shenzen (or wherever), I didn't have to contend with the great firewall, and if something went wrong, I could be over in 45 minutes. All during the California (and also China) Covid lockdowns.
That is what you're getting with a domestic board house, so if none of that is a concern, there's really no reason to pay the borderline extortionate premium to do it.
Probably poorer for one. Every American working in a state-subsidised manufacturing role is one less American working in an industry where the US has a competitive advantage, like software or energy production.
Of course if war breaks out that goes out the window.
It is unlikely, I think (thankfully) that we’ll have an existential war with China, because we’re both nuclear armed.
Like, say Panama has a civil war that shuts down the canal. That adds a huge cost to shipping, going around South America. Or say Europe (but not the US) gets involved in a war with Russia, redirecting the _massive_ European manufacturing capacity to local needs instead of exports.
All that is just to say, it is nice to have local production of stuff like food and energy that is needed to keep things going.
Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Some of what we're seeing from the r/antiwork crowd, where a bunch of millennials and zoomers are complaining that their Starbucks jobs don't pay enough comes from the fact that, for many of them, that is the only class of job available (retail/restaurants). They might welcome regular-schedule, $17/hour jobs, which wasn't an unknown rate for manufacturing in the US when I was young in the late 1980s/1990s.
I struggle to understand the attitudes and narcissism of the leaders within this country that decided we didn't have to make our own products, that people elsewhere in the world would do it for us while we really didn't do anything at all. I wonder if they thought software could employ all the people who are griping right now about living wages and meaningful work.
Incredible reserves of natural gas and oil to start with. Massive solar and wind potential as well, way beyond other highly-populated parts of the world. A huge, skilled population capable of designing and building indigenous nuclear reactors, and the capital reserves to fund and build basically whatever is needed.
> Do we employ so many such workers, that there are none left over for any sort of manufacturing?
Money going into building inefficient factories is money not spent educating software engineers, building solar farms, or. developing new gas fracking technologies. Regardless of it being public or private capital. It's not that there aren't enough workers, it's that effort spent in one way is necessarily effort not spent in another.
Slightly reducing economic efficiency may well be worth it if the result is social stability, and almost definitely to prepare for an eventual war or crisis. But we shouldn't pretend like there's no trade-off here. That's how we got into this free-trade deindustrialised problem in the first place.
While our pricing structure and regulations favor offshore, but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing?
It doesn't always, but let's be honest, most attempts to do so mean massive subsidies for manufacturers to set up in the US.
> but aren’t US tax payers bearing the true cost of safe international shipping and reliable offshore manufacturing
Arguably yes (although not the only e.g. British, Danish, and Greek ships are assisting in the Red Sea right now).
Meanwhile the Chinese competitors always failes the DRC due to laughably bad tolerances. I'm talking about edge mounted through hole connectors, not some deeply buried via barely squeezed in.
America can absolutely lose out on low-cost parts while increasing its manufacturing base. It's an insanely large field.
I would be SO MUCH FASTER at developing my farming robot if I was in a manufacturing mecca like Shenzhen. That is what I wish we could have here in the US. Not a small number of high value manufacturers, but the whole damn chain. Not only would it make our development faster, it would make our products better and cheaper and it would make our lives better.
Just to nitpick, the first inflation calculator i opened told me us inflation rate across the last 10 years has been 31.8%. So there has been some growth but not as much as you make it look.
Just going by Taylor's response sibling to this comment; he says a PCB in the US cost $500 and China $15 - that is more than an order of magnitude efficiency improvement moving to China. $2.5T wouldn't be much to crow about with that sort of productivity gap, because that would be equivalent to less than $250B in China. Presumably PCBs are an extreme case, but it goes to show that a dollar figure doesn't tell us much about the actual capabilities of the US manufacturing sector.
Given the struggles the US has had with energy [0], down 22% from their peak, it is suspicious that manufacturing is at all time highs. Something got squeezed really hard since the 70s in real terms.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use?tab...
It's not 40% higher in dollar value terms 10 years ago, that's for sure. You are leaving out the part about how the US dollar has lost value. Inflation is well in excess of 40% over the last ten years.
I think the more interesting question is if it would even be economically possible to have a Shenzhen in the US, given US property prices, labor force, wages, environmental laws, zoning restrictions, etc.
It definitely seems like once some of the factors you mention come into play these things lose momentum and move. Paul Krugman did some very interesting work on economic geography, with one result being that the leading region for a given sector will have a huge margin over the second player, so being in top position is very valuable.
"Radio Row was torn down in 1966 to make room for the World Trade Center." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Row#Demolition)
It's a little disingenuous when someone claims that the US meets its climate change goals and that China doesn't. The US is able to meet those goals in part because all of the goods it consumes comes from China where it is manufactured with coal-produced power and so-on.
I suspect that economic theory doesn't adequately explain some things that we need to understand better. There may be misunderstood risks in competitive advantage that we are ignoring at our peril.
What has changed is the proportion of working people employed in manufacturing - which has dropped. But this is inevitable unless you want to roll back decades of technical advancement and investment. And this is happening in all countries and is an inevitable consequence of manufacturing improvements. Nor is the phenomena novel - it happened about 100 years ago in agriculture which had previously been the biggest employer.
What has also dropped is its share of US GDP - but this is because other sectors - e.g. IT - have boomed - not because manufacturing has been in decline.
[1] https://nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/2022-united-states-...