Widespread shortages of semiconductors over the last year have caused many people to focus on supply chain resilience, with calls to increase chip manufacturing in the U.S. The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act (USICA), which passed the Senate last June, proposes $52 billion to aid domestic semiconductor production, and is awaiting House action. While the main focus for many people is on growing the domestic share of production of silicon chips, we should not overlook chip packaging – the essential process of encapsulating those chips in order to protect them from damage and make them usable by connecting their circuitry to the outside world. This is an area that is going to be important both for supply chain resiliency as well as to sustain future technological advances in electronics.
