‘The New Frontier’ Premieres in Washington, D.C.

From filmmaker Carl Kriss comes a look at the ongoing effort to reshore semiconductor manufacturing to the United States.

Last night, at a theater on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, “The New Frontier” premiered.

Produced by the Alliance for American Manufacturing and directed by award-winning filmmaker Carl Kriss, this 20-minute documentary tells the story of the homegrown American semiconductor industry. The essential electronic building block for everything from refrigerators to fighter jets. America invented the semiconductor in the 1950s, led in its technological innovation and production for a few decades, then offshored it – along with nearly our entire microelectronics supply chain. Today, semiconductors are largely produced in chip fabs overseas.

“The New Frontier” shows American workers and manufacturers are reclaiming that industry, one chip at a time, as the United States begins to onshore crucial production capacity. To tell that story Kriss visits K&F Electronics, a small, third-generation printed circuit board manufacturer in Fraser, Michigan; Summit Interconnect, the largest privately held printed circuit board manufacturer in the U.S., at its Hollister, California facility; and the construction site for Intel’s multibillion-dollar chip fab in central Ohio.

It is a thoroughly wired world. And in it,  “so much is dependent on a circuit board,” one K&F worker tells the camera crew.

Watch the entire documentary below, and find it on YouTube.