No. of Recommendations: 2
Chinese mfrs, over the years, became the ONLY source to do a variety of assembly because the development of that tech did NOT begin in the US. It was invented and perfected in China. So, the US lacks the *technical skills* to do many things today.
Also, we don't demand that they have the same laws about forced labor, child labor, and pollution as we do. Semiconductor assembly is a very dirty process. You can make it clean, but it's expensive. So we farm out the assembly portion to places that don't care (and are, therefore, cheaper). Big assembly houses in semi-con are located in the Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand, and China (those are the big ones we used). Amkor has facilities in all of those countries, I believe. We have domestic assembly, but we only ever used it for fast-turn small lot assemblies (generally to do some debugging of an unreleased product).
