TTM Building the Infrastructure Around the Chip

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

TTM Technologies’ new UHDI facility in Syracuse, New York, provides a starting point for a broader conversation with President and CEO Edwin Roks about the future of advanced electronics manufacturing. Roks discusses his optimism for the growing demand for finer-feature PCBs, the move toward semiconductor-level dimensions, and the role of substrates, UHDI, and heterogeneous packaging in building the next generation of electronic systems.

Nolan Johnson: Congratulations on the new facility in Syracuse, Edwin. It seems that TTM has been working on that for some time now.

Edwin Roks: Yes. We were excited to open our new factory in Syracuse this year as it was the result of about two years of work and provides a great example of how government and private industry can come together to enhance the domestic industrial base. With the help of the state of New York and with some funding from the Defense Production Act, along with great partners in the defense industry, we have brought volume manufacturing capability that did not exist in the U.S. back onshore to produce UHDI PCBs that are needed for a multitude of advanced electronics for our Aerospace and Defense end market customers.

Globally, we have 27 sites, mostly in the U.S. and Asia, and we are entering Europe as well. We have 17 sites in the U.S., 16 of them produce purely for the aerospace and defense end market. The new Syracuse factory is a really nice addition to our portfolio and to our campus in Syracuse. This new factory is about 215,000 square feet of production space, and, as I said, it supports UHDI PCBs. We already produce UHDI PCBs at other sites in the U.S., but now with the addition of our Syracuse factory, we can scale this capability.

The new factory contains highly specialized equipment, some of it designed specifically for TTM. It's unique, and it allows us to get even closer to semiconductor dimensions when we manufacture our products. For us, that’s a really important step forward.

Johnson: What market conditions led to that call for another UHDI facility?

Roks: There are always two things that go hand in hand: scaling up and innovation. The U.S. Defense industry has requested that we continue what we are doing well for them as the PCB technology leader in the U.S. with capabilities to produce substrates and the most advanced PCBs required by the domestic aerospace and defense market. But they want us to do it at greater volumes and with an accelerated pace to meet technology needs.

In response to the demand we are seeing take shape, we anticipated that we would need to increase capacity, so we built the new facility in Syracuse. But that is just the beginning of what we think we may need to do to meet domestic demand with increased defense budgets and more products moving onshore.  As an example, we anticipate needing to double production at our site in Sterling, Virginia, while increasing our technological capabilities. In fact, we’re exploring opportunities to increase capacity and technology at all of our sites in the U.S.

But to be honest, our growth trajectory is not only tied to the aerospace and defense end market. We are seeing demand increase around the globe in many of the eight end markets we support; aerospace and defense is only one of them.

We also have to stay relevant. Everything must become smaller in electronics. SWaP is the key thing: size, weight, and power. The small pitch and UHDI are just one part of the whole roadmap. Together with adding more layers, it’s a very complex but attractive and compact way of packaging.

Johnson: Boards now are getting down to semiconductor dimensions, something I worked on a couple of decades ago. How does that change your facility? How do you deal with that?  

Roks: As an example, ASML (the largest producer of lithography equipment) is now using a similar stepper for PCB as used in the nineties for semiconductor lithography.  History is repeating itself.

While that's an interesting observation in itself, if we are getting to the 15-micron level, the 10-micron level, we are now back to the bunny suits in these factories. In semiconductors, you don't even have these huge rooms anymore. It basically goes from one piece of equipment to another inside these SMIF (standard mechanical interface pod) boxes.

With PCBs, the equipment is large, and the infrastructure typically sits in less-controlled environments. We expose boards to the whole room. But at 7 or 5 microns, then yes, you absolutely have to be in a clean room environment, which creates challenges for the industry.

Johnson: In the announcement about the new facility, Cathie Gridley, executive vice president and president of TTM’s Aerospace and Defense Sector, said, "The facility is a statement about where American defense manufacturing is headed." Now, military electronics are usually conservative and very long-lived, yet this is about the strategic importance of UHDI. How does that tie together?

Roks: The defense industry is always a bit behind in innovation compared to the commercial market, and for good reason: In the defense industry, products must be 100% reliable. Medical and defense are basically the same in that way: You don't want things to fail in critical moments.

Still, we are seeing the defense sector advance in technology at a higher velocity than in the past, and in order to make the most advanced products in the world for defense, you have to innovate, and that’s where I come back to SWaP.  Manufacturers in the defense industry must now produce products that meet the same performance standards but at ever-higher frequencies and with low noise. All these things interact with and oppose each other. That’s good for engineers, but we have to innovate and stay ahead of the game. Our world is still analog; it’s still hardware. All our digital models are just sensing systems that work to translate the analog world into a digital one.

There’s a lot happening, and the U.S. can be a leader in UHDI, SAP, and mSAP, sensing actuators, and more RF applications. I believe that TTM has the right technologies to make help this happen.

Johnson: What does it mean to the Syracuse economy to add this cutting-edge facility?

Roks: The new Syracuse factory will add up to around 400 new positions, mostly development engineers and operators. That's just a start. We hope to expand this new facility and create more jobs there. In Syracuse, across our campus overall, we will have about 1,000 employees before the end of the year.

Like our other locations, we are close to universities, which helps us attract the right talent. We are also poised to increase capacity around the country.  For example, we have a large site in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that is ready for further expansion and is being prepared for the future, as we believe that the demand for domestic PCBs will grow. We can use that space in Wisconsin for commercial or defense business in the future, depending out the demand signal we receive from our customers.

Johnson: Edwin, we're about halfway through the five-year cycle for the U.S. CHIPS Act. How much has it influenced this facility specifically, and how has it helped the PCB industry as a whole?

Roks: It helps, but the PCB industry was left out of the CHIPS Act. I was at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill just a few weeks ago, and we were having discussions regarding the U.S. Defense Industrial Base, which is partly what the CHIPS Act is all about. Everybody has their own approach. I was quite involved in Canada’s programs, for instance, and they did it slightly differently from the U.S. Is it optimal? Maybe not. But we are learning a lot with the rollout of the CHIPS Act.

The U.S. government needs to build U.S. data centers and ensure they are built with secure infrastructure. PCBs are a critical part of that infrastructure. Right now, the major data center players have been procuring their PCBs from manufacturers mostly out of China. With policy shifts, that may change, as both political parties in the U.S. seem to agree that the U.S. must win the race for AI and that domestic manufacturing capability for AI infrastructure is important to build and sustain.

The CHIPS Act was the start, but it seems policymakers are also focusing on the broader supply chain and introducing policies that will incentivize domestic production throughout the supply chain. So, maybe there will be many policies put together to create a sort of CHIPS Act 2.0 for the broader electronics ecosystem, where we look at packaging and PCBs instead of just the semiconductors.

We say it a lot, and it makes sense that the chips, while critically important, are just part of the solution needed to win the AI race, because “Chips don’t float.”  They need substrates and advanced PCBs to function. A CHIPS Act 2.0 is another opportunity to bring broader technology and other volume capabilities back to the U.S.

As Moore's Law flattens, you have to combine chips in a very smart way. I see that as a second opportunity for the U.S. and North America in general to do more. That's how we see it, and TTM would like to help there.

Johnson: There was initially some healthy pessimism about the effectiveness of the CHIPS Act for U.S. electronics, especially the PCB sector. What do you see now? Is there reason to be optimistic about the outcome of the CHIPS Act?

Roks: I always like to look at the results. Look at the semiconductor players for a second. Who's the winner at the moment? Is it TSMC or is it Intel?

Johnson: Yes, exactly. There's reason to say that both are winning. Apple is moving production to Intel, which now becomes a contract manufacturer. It also opens up capacity for TSMC, which they’ve already sold to other AI chip developers.

Roks: Yes. I'm glad that Intel is winning there as well, so that's good for them. We can help in that second phase with packaging on the PCB side: heterogeneous packaging that combines several chips. At TTM, we do not produce the brains of the electronic systems (which are the chips), but we do produce the nervous system for these systems that are interconnected through our technology at greater speeds and with smaller pitches every day. We connect everything in the most advanced electronic systems in a very efficient way.

Johnson: Edwin, what does all this mean in the context of TTM and the PCB industry?

Roks: We are where our customers want us to be. We produce some of the most advanced PCBs in the world for our customers in our facilities in Asia. But, as you know, TTM is a global company with a big presence in the U.S., and we have the opportunity to bring back to the U.S. all the sophisticated techniques that we can produce around the world if our customers wish us to produce it here in the U.S.

There’s a lot of momentum for that to happen with customers on the defense and commercial side, and policymakers in Washington seem to support this activity. TTM is ready to support the enhancement of the U.S. industrial base when our customers ask us to. With our global footprint, we know that there is more than one practical answer to supply chain challenges. We maintain fantastic facilities in China, provide China Plus One capabilities with our plant in Malaysia, and now we are in Europe with a growing portfolio. But of course, we always make sure that we do the right things in the U.S. for our customers.   

Johnson: Thanks so much for an insightful conversation, Edwin.

Roks: You’re very welcome.