As China has become the most important industrial base in the world, related upstream industries have gradually shifted to China, and the PCB industry is one of them. At the same time, with the vigorous development of new energy vehicles, 5G and other new technologies, higher requirements have been put forward for PCBs. As an important electronic component, its role is becoming more and more prominent at present.

   Since 2006, China’s PCB output value has surpassed Japan to become the world’s largest production base. In 2020, its output value will account for 53.8% of the world’s total. What’s interesting is that although the global PCB market has shown a certain cyclical nature, China’s PCB output value is constantly rising. In 2020, the domestic PCB board industry output value will reach more than 35 billion U.S. dollars. However, under the prosperity, there is a saying in the market that the future PCB will be replaced by chips, and where will the PCB market go?

【The development of new energy vehicles and 5G markets drives the increase in PCB demand】

PCB is known as the “mother of electronic components” and is a bridge that carries electronic components and connects circuits. However, in the past two years, the Sino-US trade conflict and the new crown epidemic have caused a huge impact on the semiconductor industry, and PCBs are also indispensable. The avoidance was affected to some extent.
    According to industry insiders, judging from the current terminal market and supply chain feedback, the current demand for PCBs is actually on the rise, including 5G, smart homes, and new energy vehicles. Taking new energy vehicles as an example, the demand for PCBs will be 4-5 times that of traditional vehicles, and the overall market demand is strong.
At the same time, due to the shortage of chips in the market, the progress of many customers’ products is not as expected, including PCB assembly and later production of finished products.

Martin Xu, technical director of BETON PCB factory, believes that the current situation of chip shortages and price increases has lasted for a long time. Many domestic electronics companies have responded by localizing or replacing chips. A large number of products require PCB revision designs, and some PCB manufacturers have also approved Free proofing has increased the enthusiasm for PCB proofing of many enterprises and college teachers and students, but it has brought a certain degree of growth to the PCB manufacturing market. 

Although the demand for PCBs in new energy vehicles has greatly increased, due to the use of large-capacity batteries in new energy vehicles, the current in the circuit becomes larger, current-carrying design and thermal design have become critical, and reliability is more important for PCBs. Design, but from the performance point of view, the point that affects the reliability the most is heat. Therefore, it is necessary to control the heat from the IC package, through the PCB, to the complete product under the operating environment.

 In addition, new energy vehicles are also equipped with technologies such as autonomous driving, radar, and smart cockpits. Compared with traditional cars, the PCB design is much more complicated, and to achieve these rich functions, the speed requirements of the signals carried by the PCB will be higher. , And there may be a demand for HDI boards in smart cockpits. At the same time, new energy vehicles are usually equipped with many camera modules, which requires more rigid and flexible boards. In addition to new energy vehicles, high-end PCB manufacturing for integrated circuit supporting industries, such as semiconductor testing equipment, will usher in a rapid growth process in the future, and this field was mainly occupied by the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries in the past. 

In the field of display technology, especially the next generation of active light-emitting LEDs, the backlight module is usually as large as the screen, and the PCB is as large. And this kind of display device is usually used in fields such as monitoring large screens and outdoor advertising screens, and the market demand is currently rising. In the field of 5G and smart phones, Lin Chaowen said that 5G is mainly reflected in the design considerations of PCB materials and signal transmission quality. 

Compared with 4G, 5G has higher speed, larger capacity, and lower latency. The “heating” problem that also brings to 5G base stations and terminals has attracted much attention from the industry. In the field of smart phones, 5G mobile phones are continuously upgraded in the direction of high performance, high screen quality, high integration, lightness and thinness. Compared with the 4G era, the amount of heat generation has increased significantly, and the demand for heat dissipation has also increased significantly. 

In the circuit design of the 5G field, there is an urgent need for more energy-efficient devices and more effective PCB heat dissipation solutions.
     It can be seen that with the current development of new energy vehicles, 5G, new display technology, semiconductor testing and other fields, the domestic market’s demand for PCBs is also rising, and due to technological upgrades, PCB design has also been advanced. Require.

【What is a good PCB】

The PCB industry has developed for such a long time, and now there have been some new changes in PCB design. One is more miniaturization, mainly driven by the portability requirements of smart devices; the other is the change of PCB from a traditional rigid board to a flexible and hard board. And as the PCB moves towards the high-end, there will be two main aspects, one is the higher and higher data carrying and transmission rate, and the other is for smart homes and wearable devices, where the demand for HDI becomes more and more obvious.

 Users have higher and higher requirements for PCBs. Martin Xu said that higher speed, smaller size, and faster time to market are both challenges and opportunities for PCB design. For customers, on the premise of meeting performance indicators, it is best to have a faster design delivery time. And a good PCB needs to meet the signal integrity, power integrity and electromagnetic compatibility design, which is mainly reflected in the circuit performance. 

At the level that the user can see with the naked eye, an excellent PCB work should be densely spaced, neat and symmetrical, and take into account the aesthetics of the layout. At the same time, it takes into account the user’s operating habits, such as the reasonable layout of the sockets on the panel, which is convenient for plugging and unplugging, and there are clear safety instructions. According to industry standards, a good PCB must first meet the performance needs of users, and at the same time, it can also meet the standard in terms of reliability, and it is best to have a certain advantage in cost. Of course, for different products, the emphasis on the above three points will be different.

【Will the chip replace the PCB ?】

Although there is a strong demand for PCB in the market today, many new technologies also put forward higher requirements for PCB design. However, there is a saying in the market that with the trend of integration of hardware and software, applications will become simpler and simpler, and the original need to build complex circuits can now be solved with only one chip. If all this comes true, then the PCB boom today is just a bubble. 

But for this statement, Martin Xu said that although the chip integration is getting higher and higher, it is impossible to replace the PCB in the short term, and it is still necessary to achieve basic support through the PCB. For example, the SoC of a mobile phone integrates a series of modules including CPU, GPU, DDR, etc., which can be regarded as the integration of all modules that could only be realized on a PCB board before. 

However, there are still some problems. For example, even in the 5nm era, SoC cannot independently integrate all the chips of the mobile phone under the premise of ensuring its own content; at the same time, even if the chips are integrated together, the problem of small chip heat accumulation is still the current one. Difficulties, such as the heating problem of Snapdragon 888, even Apple A14 can not solve the heating problem; in addition, making high-density chips larger to integrate PCB content will reduce the yield rate, so it is better to put it directly on the PCB. 

According to industry insiders, there is indeed a trend towards chip integration. For example, mobile phone chips have integrated baseband and other related devices, which has greatly reduced the area of​the mobile phone’s mother board. But what needs to be noticed is that when these chips are highly integrated, miniaturization, lightness and thinness need to be pursued, while ensuring that their performance meets the requirements.

 In some respects, the production of the product motherboard is more difficult. At the same time, some PCB external interfaces are difficult to achieve in the chip, and how to access USB has become a problem. In some high-reliability products, there are fewer applications. Need to consider the cost of the product and the corresponding demand issues. 

Therefore, for a long period of time in the future, the demand for traditional PCBs will continue to grow. But an illusion can be put forward here, because PCB is mainly based on insulator loaded conductor lines, and the chip is manufactured based on semiconductors. So whether semiconductors can be used as materials to manufacture PCB boards in the future, of course, this involves the price of raw materials, signal impedance characteristics, and physical issues such as durability, heat dissipation, and distortion. But if it can be realized, then this PCB made of semiconductors can also be regarded as a PCB-sized chip.

【Concluding remarks】

From the perspective of the market in recent years, China’s PCB industry is still developing rapidly, and with the emergence of applications such as 5G, new energy vehicles, and new display technologies, new challenges have been presented to PCBs. At the same time, the maturity of the industry has also given birth to the needs of third-party PCB designers. Through the docking of the original factory and the PCB manufacturer, a cost-effective and mass-production solution is finally formed.As for whether chips will replace PCBs in the future, at least not in the short term, and demand is still growing. But in the long run, many innovations come from bold assumptions.