The industrial Bureau of the MOEA intends to promote the PCB industry through the “High-End PCB Industry Development & Promotion Plan”, whose goal is to progressively drive the upgrading of small and medium businesses by implementing such measures as enhancing the integration of government, academic, and R&D resources, building automated production lines to serve as a role model in the PCB sector, and performing pilot trials at the regional level. This plan focuses on producing high value products and automating production lines in accordance with the requirements of the Taiwan Printed Circuits Association (TPCA) on the innovation of domestic PCB manufacturers and adhering to the three following strategies: “linking local businesses, connecting with the future, and forming international alliances”.

In response to the government’s call for industrial promotion by including the PCB industry among the top priorities of production automation and thanks to the active participation of the Electronics Sector Team, the Industrial Bureau of the MOEA, and its planned investment in industrial promotion,  TPCA will elevate the capacity of our country to integrate “software and hardware” systems through the joint cooperation among such organizations as the electro-optical system bureau of ITRI and the innovation research bureau of the investment decision-making commission. The inaugural meeting of the alliance among countries automating PCB production will officially take place on April 12, 2017, and said alliance, through which the resources and strengths of such members as Yanhua Technology, Xunde Machinery, Xinxing Electronics, Jingpeng Industries, Yaohua Electronics, Investment Decision-Making Commission, ITRI, and TPCA will be pooled, will aim to accelerate the PCB industry of Taiwan toward automation and high added-value through reference-automated PCB production platform technologies based on a common structure, as well as a uniform communication protocol regarding IOT (Internet of Things) of equipment.

The white paper published by TPCA in 2014 regarding the two-stage development of Taiwan’s PCB industry proposes three visions for industrial development with the aim of assisting the PCB industry in increasing comprehensive competitiveness through inter-sector links. Among those visions, automation has always been the key for the future development of the PCB industry, and the top priority requires an urgent solution to the inconsistency among communication protocols regarding IOT of equipment. Therefore, the PCB industry has agreed that a standard for IOT communication should be developed under the guidelines referred to as the Semiconductor Industry Communication Standards (“SECS/GEM”), and in this regard, TPCA is also cooperating with the SEMI to apply an international standard on the IOT communication of PCB equipment. Furthermore, TPCA is actively pursuing its plan to form an alliance among countries to verify the concrete benefits from the standardization of PCB IOT communication protocol. The vision of PCB industrial automation and the industrialization of automated machines is expected to be fulfilled through the formation of an alliance among PCB-making countries, which is based on a group strategy.

Furthermore, in response to the need to promote chip design and semiconductor technologies in our country, TPCA will continue to drive the integration between PCB equipment suppliers and the domestic semiconductor industry in conjunction with the “Plan on R&D and Application of Chip Design and Frontier Semiconductor Technologies” to enable the implementation of the crucial policy of localization of automating machines by integrating home-made machines in the domestic semiconductor industry, simultaneously fueling the growth of production in relevant domestic sectors and extending the impact of the semiconductor industry beyond the borders of our country

(Sources from TPCA).