HARDWARE SECURITYCircuit Boards Must Be Trusted. So We’d Better Make Them in Australia
While national security debates have focused on chips and microelectronics, the role of printed circuit board (PCBs) in underpinning system trust has gone largely unexamined. In today’s contested environment, that carries strategic consequences.
Every secure system, from missile guidance to a water treatment controller, shares an essential part: the printed circuit board (PCB). These boards form the skeleton of modern electronics. Australia no longer has the means to fabricate them at scale, let alone verify their integrity.
Without this capability Australia puts its defense and research at risk. But if it could make PCBs, it would have less exposure to loss of supply, an ability to get new designs faster, and end-to-end security in design, fabrication and deployment.
While national security debates have focused on chips and microelectronics, the role of PCBs in underpinning system trust has gone largely unexamined. In today’s contested environment, that carries strategic consequences.
PCBs define how systems function. They route signals, interface sensors, and direct power across every layer of an electronic platform. They are like a circulatory system for digital machines. Their importance is matched by their fragility. PCBs are unusually difficult to defend against tampering, in part because we assume they’re benign. Few organizations inspect the boards themselves for integrity. Fewer still know how.
Recent revelations about unauthorized communication modules embedded in Chinese-made solar inverters should serve as a wake-up call. Capable of transmitting data over mobile networks without detection, these weren’t software-level compromises. The modules were embedded at the hardware layer, hidden in plain sight. Even now, investigators have only a partial picture of what was added and little clarity on how it got there or why.
Australia’s defense and critical infrastructure programs increasingly rely on supply chain assurance. AUKUS, the Guided Weapons and Explosive Ordnance Enterprise and sovereign industrial capability reforms all rely on transparent, trustworthy hardware. Yet without the ability to fabricate our own PCBs, we continue to outsource the physical foundation of sensitive systems, from submarines to satellite payloads.
This wasn’t always this way. Until the early 2000s, Australia maintained a modest but capable PCB manufacturing sector. Offshoring, cost pressure and policy inattention hollowed it out. Today, there are no domestic providers with the facilities, ability to produce complex, multilayer boards, or security protocols to support high-assurance fabrication.
There are strong arguments for domestically making PCBs for critical functions. Sensitive systems that are safe from foreign meddling must be made close to design and integration teams and with trusted labor and secure facilities. PCBs are also heavy, damage-prone and needed within precise timeframes. In high-assurance contexts, shipping boards halfway around the world introduces both risk and delay. In this sense, security and supply chain efficiency are not competing priorities. They are aligned.
Other governments have recognized this. The United States, Japan and several European countries have all begun rebuilding domestic PCB capability, not just for economic reasons but for strategic continuity.
Alongside investments in chipmaking, they are reintroducing domestic PCB capacity to support national security goals. Australia should follow their lead with clear intent.
We don’t need to match high-volume commercial PCB production. What we do need is a secure, government-backed fabrication facility focused on defense, research and trusted prototyping. It should support multilayer boards, collaboration on design with primes, and security controls fit for contested environments.
Such a facility wouldn’t serve only Defense and its industrial base. It would anchor Australia’s relevance in AUKUS Pillar Two, create footholds in space and quantum supply chains, and support edge computing platforms where embedded trust is non-negotiable. But this kind of sovereign capability doesn’t emerge organically. It requires patient capital, real demand and forward-leaning procurement policy. Governments must invest and commit with long-term contracts, not one-off grants.
The National Reconstruction Fund is well placed to support this. But it must move beyond industrial revitalization. This is about strategic sovereignty, not economic nostalgia.
In trusted computing, verification beats assumption. If we can’t verify how our systems are made, we can’t be sure how they’ll behave. That’s the heart of zero trust. It must now extend all the way to the circuit board.
Australia can no longer afford to treat PCBs as just another part. They are infrastructure. They are critical. And right now, we are building them on borrowed trust.
Jason Van der Schyff is a consulting technologist whose work spans secure infrastructure, strategic supply chains and sovereign industrial capability within the AUKUS and Indo-Pacific context. This article is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
