The microelectronics ecosystem is at a critical juncture. The U.S. needs to be able to build in America what is designed in America – especially complex PCBs and IC substrates. Calumet Electronics Corporation is leading the way to make this happen.
Calumet Electronics’ VP / COO Todd Brassard is featured in a Forbes interview in which he offers his insight on the ramifications of America’s bottlenecked defense electronics supply chain.
Supply chain stories aren’t sexy. Maybe that’s why the dangerously fragile, technologically lagging American defense electronics supply chain isn’t registering on the national security risk meter. But it should. The U.S. is facing shortages and security vulnerabilities with printed circuit boards and integrated circuit substrates crucial to the sexiest weapons systems we have.
“When we say that the problem is urgent we really mean it. It’s falling on deaf ears,” says Todd Brassard, chief operating officer of Calumet Electronics, a Michigan-based printed circuit board (PCB) manufacturer.
Calumet, which with a workforce of 300 makes high-reliability circuit boards for aerospace and defense, industrial controls, utilities, and medical sectors, typifies the small firms that make up a critical link in the supply of defense electronics. The kind of PCBs and IC substrates it turns out are the base hardware in every American weapons/ISR system.
