Hot Circuits

Speeding past the slow boat to China.

Prototyping is the foundation of innovation in engineering. The greatest inventors of history were masters of it, and some erected entire institutions to further its development. This is exemplified by Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park, described by many as the world’s greatest playground for inventors. In the Industrial Age of the second half of the nineteenth century, the importance of prototyping was established, and it was then that institutions to further it were first established. Such institutions continued to power the development of the twentieth century, with Bell Labs being one of the most prominent examples. However, the financialization of the great engineering firms exacted a slow but steadily growing burden on such facilities for innovation as in-house manufacturing was substituted with outsourced components. In this way did the titans of industry lose their strength. It is for this reason that I propose a new model for the promotion of invention.

The Western world still largely leads in the development of new mechanical implements. Innovation in this realm is still well supported and has a high barrier cost to entry, so I shall not consider it further here. However, the situation for circuit boards, and electronic components in general is not nearly so favorable. When ordering printed circuits, one must choose between either extremely expensive boards made in the United States or very cheap ones made in Shenzhen. Very few manufacturers choose to make boards onshore, unless they are military contractors. Hence the rank and file of aspiring inventors must suffer the inevitable consequences of inferior board quality, unintelligible customer service, and sometimes even falsely labeled components.

My solution to this problem would be a new business chain, which for the sake of argument I will call “Hot Circuits”. This firm will operate as follows. A customer would first upload CAD files on the company website, after which said files would be sent to a regional manufacturing center, preferably within one hundred miles of the designer. Automated equipment staffed by early career engineers/interns would then handle the incoming queue of customer designed boards. The boards would then be available for pickup or delivery. The main market for Hot Circuits would be those inventors who are looking to make between five and fifty copies of professional quality boards. Such customers are typically beyond soldering their own crude prototypes, but are not in a financial position to manufacture at scale. Local production of boards also reduces turnaround time in the iterative design process, and guarantees speedy delivery in a time of increasing geopolitical instability. Your local Hot Circuits would not only function as industrial facility, but would also spur interest in technological innovation among motivated youth. Perhaps it would sponsor a local league of the sport of tomorrow, thereby cultivating a new generation of future customers.

It could be applied further to the microchips and solid state components themselves. It is not widely known, but in certain locations of the remote hinterlands of the United States, there are complete semiconductor manufacturing facilities. As yet, they are only used for training new engineers and military production. In the coming years, I would expect a company such as Hot Circuits would make use of these facilities to expand its operations and multiply its branches as the demand for specialized hardware increases after the almost inevitable death of Moore’s Law. For these reasons will distributed manufacturing be the cornerstone of the next Heroic Age of Invention.