Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories is moving into Moscow with plans to build a 140,000 square foot facility on land the company recently purchased southwest of the city on Highway 95.
The 150 acre parcel was previously owned by Deesten Farms LLC, who worked with city officials to annex and rezone the land from Latah County to the city.
SEL hopes to break ground on a new printed circuit board fabrication plant by spring 2021, according to a Nov. 23 news release from SEL. They plan for construction to be completed by mid-2022.
“Since (circuit boards) are such a highly engineered part of our designs, we started looking around and said ‘You know what? This is a great time to vertically integrate. Let’s bring this capability in-house,’” Dave Whitehead, chief executive officer at SEL, said.
Whitehead said printed circuit boards are fundamental components of the electronic devices SEL manufactures to operate and control electric power systems.
Currently SEL engineers their own circuit boards, but they need to send their designs to separate fabrication companies. Being able to manufacture the company’s own circuit boards will shorten SEL’s supply chain, which was a large motivation for bringing that capability close to home.
“Keeping the supply chain really short and having that capability (to manufacture the circuit boards ourselves), you learn so much about a product or a system and can control the quality when you do it all yourself,” Whitehead said. “That was another big motivator for us to bring it in-house.”
The company expects to begin the process with current employees from the community then will expand in Moscow as the operation grows, according to the release.
Brian Johnson, a power engineering professor at the University of Idaho, said he thinks the new facility might provide a good place where the students could see the process of building circuit boards, the safety that goes along with it and the equipment used.
“Once the (Moscow) facilities get up and running, that would be another good place to take students for tours so they can actually see, firsthand, how these facilities work and how these processes work, where safety comes in and where environmental concerns come in,” Johnson said.
Johnson said SEL and the university have a mutually beneficial relationship where the electronics company provides funds and equipment to educate engineering students, while the university provides potential employees and education to current employees. He said he expects that relationship to continue with even more possibilities for UI as the Moscow plant grows.
According to the release, the new fabrication plant will be state-of-the-art. SEL is partnering with GreenSource Fabrication to make sure the facility and manufacturing processes have the least amount of negative environmental impact possible.
“What makes this so green is, historically, there’s just a lot of chemical processes that happen when you go to build a circuit board,” Whitehead said. “Greensource has come up with a way of really reducing the environmental footprint of board manufacturing, so much so that there will be no chemical discharge of liquids back into, say, the sewer system of Moscow.”
Johnson said the soldering processes and chemicals used to manufacture the printed circuit boards is what can make the fabrication process harmful to the environment. Johnson said he speaks about the importance of environmental safety in his lower level classes to get the students comfortable with the subject early in their college education.
“I can eventually see the Moscow facility growing to be similar to our Pullman facility,” Whitehead said. “It will take us a number of years because it took us almost 30 years to grow to this size. It probably won’t take us 30 years to grow to that size any more, but it will take a number of years to be as big as Pullman.”
Anteia McCollum can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @antxiam5.