A Costa Rican plant for advanced component manufacturing

This comes with several challenges including variability in supply and demand, geopolitical tensions, and unforeseen events that may lead to delays, increased costs, and supply chain inefficiencies. The rapid pace of technological innovation may also reduce the lifespan of electronic products, requiring constant evolution. Regardless of the source of electronic parts and components, the only way to ensure reliability and safety of electronic products is by meeting and exceeding quality standards – a feat that not every manufacturer can guarantee.

Why Costa Rica?

Costa Rica is the fifth largest Central American country with a population of almost five million. Traditionally, the country’s major exports have been agriculture goods, such as coffee, sugar cane, pineapples, and bananas; however, since the 1990s, manufacturing has made major in-roads into their economy. Specifically, numerous companies have established facilities for manufacturing electronics, aerospace systems and medical devices in Costa Rica. These products are shipped throughout the Americas and, in fact, all over the world.

Several factors have led to Costa Rica’s growing manufacturing sector. These include a highly educated and trained workforce, with one of the highest literacy rates in the Americas. This is enabled by the country’s commitment to primary and secondary education, and the establishment of numerous public and private universities. Costa Rica therefore has high availability of skilled engineers, technicians, assemblers, and operators within their manufacturing facilities.

Costa Rica has a stable political and economic environment where the government has consistently provided a favourable import and export climate. In fact, the government has obtained numerous preferential trade agreements with its trading partners that include a large majority of the country’s foreign trade. This has led to a low cost of doing business, lower taxes and tariffs and lower cost of operations, which results in lower prices and higher profit margins for manufacturers.

More recently, the Chips and Science Act of 2022 is an attempt by the US Government to source critical semiconductor products domestically and in friendly regions that are in close proximity to the US. Since Costa Rica hosts the region’s only Intel semiconductor assembly and test plant, electronics manufacturers within Costa Rica may, as a result, enjoy a significant economic advantage.

Finally, Costa Rica is geographically located between North and South America, and has ports on the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This ensures direct connectivity and a global reach by truck, rail, ship, or air to large markets in North and South America, Europe, and Asia. This ensures availability of goods and services with uninterrupted supply chains.

The plant and its people 

The Smiths Interconnect Costa Rica manufacturing facility is located near the capital city and major population centre of San Jose. This enables Smiths to draw upon a large skilled workforce that is trained in nearby schools and universities.

Smiths also provides goods and services to numerous local companies that have nearby facilities for the manufacture of electronics systems and components, including aerospace systems and medical devices. This centralised location is close to the International Airport and East and West Coast shipping ports, providing easy access to receive raw materials and ship finished products.

The Smiths facility has over 33,700 square feet of manufacturing space with over 150 full-time employees. Manufacturing operations have been recently upgraded by conversion from manual to semi-automated operations using the latest robotic technology. These robots are used for many purposes including assembly, testing, soldering and inspection. Robotic technology has many advantages including increased productivity, faster throughput, lower costs, higher quality, and improved safety; all of which benefit customers and development partners.

Smiths’ facility offers several different specialties such as high reliability testing and manufacturing services, thin and thick film wafer processing, plating, tape and reel, J-STD solder assembly and automation. The facility and its manufacturing processes have been certified to AS 9100D and ISO 9001:2015 for quality, ISO 45001:2018 for safety and ISO 14001:2015 for environmental assurance.

A number of high-profile space programmes use Smiths Interconnects’ components that are manufactured in Costa Rica. For example, the Frontier Mars Rover uses the Thermopad, the Indian Chandrayaan-3s Moon Lander has both the Thermopad and LabFlex T cables and the F-35 Lightning military aircraft features radar system attenuators.

Products and capabilities

The Smiths Interconnect Costa Rica plant is known for a producing a wide range of electronic components and is working towards the implementation of a successful semiconductor manufacturing and assembly capability. Current products include the following: Resistive components

These include resistors, terminations, and attenuators. They have the highest power-to-size ratio resistive products utilising CVD Diamond substrates.

Terminations

Smiths Interconnects’ terminators are designed as either integrated into isolators or to operate as stand-alone components. Loads, terminations, and attenuators are incorporated within assemblies used in applications where RF power levels are essential.

Fixed and temperature variable attenuators

The Thermopad is a great example of an attenuator that is a completely passive, easy to implement as a solution for gain compensation and has been designed specifically for demanding, high reliability applications.

Coaxial attenuators

Smith Interconnect specialises in fixed attenuators from DC through Q band. These are available in a low power chip package and a 0.250 sq high power BeO package. The input power ratings range from 0.1 to 120W. The attenuation values range from 0 to 20dB with 30dB available on some devices. The terminals are made with thick or thin film material.

Signal distribution devices

Power dividers, samplers and crossovers come in a wide variety of products to support signal distribution applications up to 50GHz. They are surface-mountable for ease of installation, have a small footprint and are RoHS compliant.

Semi-rigid and flexible cable assemblies

These cables are space qualified and available with a copper or aluminum jacket, with different platings and four different diameters (.047, .085, .141 and .250 inches). High frequency RF cable assemblies are available with a wide variety of flexible and semi-rigid cable types with space orbit qualifications and are well-suited for satellite payloads (GEO/MEO and LEO constellations), deep space probes, ground antenna networks and space robotic systems.

Space grade cable assemblies

Assembles like the SpaceNXT QT series offer improved phase stability over a wide range of temperatures found in space environments while meeting all NASA/ESA outgassing specifications. It is equipped with ETFE radiation resistant jacket materials. This combination enables customers to benefit from lower cost of ownership while improving system performance.

Smiths Interconnect

Smiths Interconnect is a provider of technically differentiated electronic products and components in the aerospace and defense industries. Its products provide high levels of performance whenever a technologically advanced, high-quality solution is required to ensure reliability and safety. Smiths’ in-house capabilities encompass design, development, manufacturing, and testing to anticipate market needs, respond quickly and accurately to customers and provide the most reliable connectivity solutions.  

Smiths Interconnect Costa Rica plant has been operating for over 25 years but is only one of many presences worldwide. Smiths Interconnect is situated in 12 countries with 25 sales, R&D and manufacturing locations throughout North America, Europe, Asia and North Africa.

The Costa Rica plant is a good example of Smiths Interconnect’s commitment to invest substantially in emerging economies and towards supporting economic development in these regions.