Bench Gets Vertical

摘要

HOW MANY GREENFIELD fabrication plants do you think have been built in the US in the past 10 years? I can think of three, and two of them were designed and built by the same person and corporate parent. There's Whelen Engineering, the OEM that opened a captive shop in 2015. The brains behind that, Alex Stejnnski, then designed and built GreenSource Fabri-cation, which launched in 2018. And perhaps we can count TTM's new plant in Chippewa Falls, built in a converted 20-year-old, 40,000-sq. ft. warehouse and officially opened last winter. Now we can add one more to the list. More sur-prising, an EMS company built it. Last month Benchmark Electronics opened the doors to its 122,000 sq. ft. state-of-the-art factory in Phoenix. The company, the fifth largest EMS in the US and 18th in the world according to the CIRCUITS ASSEMBLY Top 50, is known for putting components on boards, not making the substrates themselves. The new venture is a leap of faith, buoyed by the desire to control the product development from end to end. "One of the elements that we recognize (custom-ers) want to control is the ability to design, develop and locally fabricate high-performance circuits and interconnects here in the US," said Daniel Everitt, vice president, Benchmark Lark Technology, the company's RF and high-speed electronics unit.