IC Substrate - Will PCB be replaced by IC in the future?

Judging from the current terminal equipment sales market and its supply chain management feedback, the current requirements for printed circuit boards are actually rising, including 5G, smart home systems and new energy vehicles. In addition to new energy vehicles, the industrial chain of integrated circuit chip auxiliary facilities, such as advanced PCB production and manufacturing of semiconductor material testing instruments, will enter a rapid growth process in the future. This industry was mainly occupied by Britain, Japan, South Korea and other China in the past.

As China has become the most important industrial park in the world, the upstream and downstream industrial chains are gradually migrating to mainland China, and the printed circuit board field is one of them. At the same time, with the rapid development of new energy vehicles, 5G and other new technology applications, printed circuit boards have clearly put forward higher requirements. As a key electronic equipment component, its efficacy is more prominent today.

Since 2006, China’s annual output value of PCB has surpassed Japan, becoming the world’s largest manufacturing base, and its share of annual output value in 2020 has reached 53.8% of the world’s. Interestingly, although the global PCB sales market shows certain regularity, the annual output value of China's PCB continues to soar. In 2020, the annual output value operation scale of China's PCB board field will exceed 35 billion U.S. dollars. But under the prosperity, such a name is widely circulated in the sales market, and the future PCB will be replaced by integrated circuits. Where will the PCB sales market go?

The development trend of the new energy vehicle and 5G sales market has promoted the increase in PCB demand.

The printed circuit board is called the mother of electronic components, and is a road bridge that installs electronic components and connects power circuits. However, the contradictions of the trade war and the new crown pneumonia epidemic in the past two years have had a huge impact on the semiconductor industry, and printed circuit boards are inevitably hurt.

According to professionals, from the current terminal equipment sales market and its supply chain management feedback, the current requirements for printed circuit boards are actually rising, including 5G, smart home systems and new energy vehicles. Taking new energy vehicles as an example, the total number of requirements for printed circuit boards will be 4-5 times that of traditional vehicles, and the overall market demand is sufficient.

At the same time, due to the out-of-stock issue of integrated circuits in the sales market, the progress of many customers' products cannot be compared with expectations, including PCB assembly and the production of finished products in the middle and late stages.

Lin Chaowen, head of Indavino’s technology, believes that due to the long delay in the price increase of integrated circuits out of stock, many electronic technology companies in China are solving the problem in accordance with domestic production or replacement of integrated circuits. Many products require PCB weight. To make design plans, some PCB factories also follow a completely free proofing method, which has increased the enthusiasm of many companies and college teachers and students for PCB proofing, but has brought a certain degree of improvement to the PCB production and sales market.

Although the requirements of new energy vehicles for printed circuit boards have increased sharply, due to the choice of large-capacity lithium batteries, the amount of current in the power supply circuit has increased, and current-carrying design schemes and thermal design have become more and more important. Printed circuit boards pay more attention to the optimization of structural design, but from the point of view of characteristics, the point that threatens stability is combustion. Therefore, it is necessary to gradually move from integrated circuit packaging to integrated circuit board to detailed products in the software environment.

In addition, new energy vehicles are also equipped with technologies such as unmanned driving, radar detection, and smart cockpit. Compared with traditional vehicles, the PCB design scheme is much more complicated, and to achieve this colorful effect, the PCB installation The speed requirement of the data signal is higher, and the requirement of HDI board is likely to appear on the intelligent cockpit. At the same time, new energy vehicles are generally equipped with a large number of camera modules, which requires a large number of hard and soft fusion boards.

In addition to new energy vehicles, the ADT7476AARQZ integrated circuit chip auxiliary facility industry chain, such as advanced PCB production and manufacturing of semiconductor material testing instruments, will enter a rapid growth process in the future. In the past, this industry was mainly occupied by China such as the United Kingdom, Japan, and South Korea.

Moreover, in the optoelectronic technology industry, especially the next generation of active LEDs, the backlight module is generally the number of display screens and the number of PCBs. Moreover, this kind of display system is generally used in industries such as monitoring large screens and outdoor advertising and publicity screens, and the market demand is currently soaring.

Lin Chaowen said in the 5G and smart machine industries that the key to 5G is the consideration of PCB raw materials and the design of data signal transmission quality. Relative to 5G, 4G is faster, larger, and has less delay. Similarly, the scalding problem caused by 5G communication base stations and terminal equipment has also caused widespread concern. In the smartphone industry, 5G mobile phones have been continuously upgraded in terms of excellent performance, high display quality, high integration, and light weight. The relative calorific value has greatly increased during the 4G period, and the heat emission requirements have also been greatly increased. In the circuit principle of the 5G industry, there is an urgent need for more environmentally friendly and energy-saving components and a more reasonable PCB heat removal solution.

It can be seen that with the development trends of several industries such as new energy vehicles, 5G, new optoelectronic technology, and semiconductor material testing at this stage, the Chinese sales market’s requirements for printed circuit boards are also increasing. Due to technological upgrades, printed circuit boards The design also clearly puts forward higher requirements.

What is a good PCB?

The printed circuit board industry has developed for such a long time, and now there have been some new changes in the design of printed circuit boards. One is more miniaturization, the key is to promote the portable requirements of smart products; second, the printed circuit board has changed from a traditional rigid board to a hard-soft fusion board. And when the printed circuit board enters the high-end, two key aspects will appear. One is that the installation and transmission speed of data information is getting higher and higher, and the second is that the requirements for smart home systems and smart wearable devices are becoming more and more obvious.

Customers are increasingly demanding printed circuit boards. Lin Chaowen said that faster, smaller, and faster time to market for printed circuit board design is both a challenge and an opportunity. For customers, it is best to have a faster delivery time of the design plan under the premise of reaching the performance parameters.

A good printed circuit board must achieve the integrity of the signal, the consistency of the switching power supply, and the key to the electromagnetic compatibility test design plan is reflected in the characteristics of the power supply circuit. In terms of what customers can see, an excellent printed circuit board work should be intimate, tidy, symmetrical, reasonable layout, beautiful, and generous in a reasonable layout. At the same time, it also has customers' actual operating habits, such as the effective arrangement of power sockets on the control panel, easy insertion, and established safety signs.

From the perspective of national standards, a good PCB must first meet the customer's performance test plan, and the stability can also be standardized, and it is best to have a certain advantage in cost. Naturally, for different products, the focus of the above three points will be different.

Will integrated circuits replace PCBs?

Although the current sales market has high requirements for PCBs, the application of many new technologies also puts forward higher requirements for PCB design. But there is a name on the sales market. With the development trend of the integration of hardware configuration and mobile phone software, applications will become simpler and simpler. Now only one integrated circuit can be used to construct a complex power supply circuit. If all this is fulfilled, then the current PCB boom is just a bubble.

But for this, Lin Chaowen said that although the integrated ic processing speed is getting faster and faster, it is unlikely to replace the PCB in a short time, but the basic support point must still be completed according to the PCB. For example, the SoC on the mobile phone integrates a series of control modules, including CPU, GPU, DDR, etc., which can be regarded as the integration of all control modules previously completed on only one PCB board.

However, there are still some problems. For example, even in the 5nm period, SoC cannot integrate all the integrated ICs on the mobile phone separately under the premise of guaranteeing its own configuration content; at the same time, even if the integrated ICs are integrated together, small integrated ICs will accumulate heat. The problem is still a problem at this stage, such as the hot problem of the Snapdragon processor 888, and even the iPhone A14 cannot solve the hot problem; in addition, making the high-density integrated IC larger to integrate PCB content will reduce the pass rate of the product, Not as good as putting it on the PCB.

According to professionals, there is indeed a development trend of integrated circuit integration. For example, related components such as baseband chips have been integrated in the mobile phone processor, greatly reducing the total area of the mobile phone computer motherboard. But what must be noticed is that when the aspect ratio of this kind of integrated circuit is integrated, miniaturization and lightness must be pursued while ensuring that its characteristics meet the requirements.

At some levels, the difficulty of making commercial computer motherboards has increased. At the same time, it is difficult for some PCB open sockets to ensure that how to connect to the USB becomes a problem in the integrated IC. And in some reliable products, it is used less. Must fully consider the cost of goods and the corresponding requirements. Therefore, for a long period of time in the future, the traditional PCB requirements will continue to grow.

But here can clearly put forward an illusion, because printed circuit boards are mainly based on conductors and insulators to load electrical conductor routes, while integrated circuits are manufactured based on semiconductor materials. Therefore, whether semiconductor materials can be used as raw materials to produce PCB sheets in the future will naturally involve the price of raw materials, the impedance characteristics of data signal characteristics, and physical issues such as durability, heat dissipation, and distortion.

However, if it can be done, PCB board made of semiconductor materials can also be regarded as PCB-sized integrated ICs.

Judging from the sales market in recent years, China's printed circuit board industry chain is still developing rapidly. With the application of 5G, new energy vehicles, and new optoelectronic technologies, new challenges have been presented to printed circuit boards. At the same time, the improvement of this field also has the requirements of third-party printed circuit board designers. According to the requirements of the original manufacturer and the printed circuit board manufacturer, a cost-effective mass production plan was finally produced. Whether integrated circuits will replace printed circuit boards in the future, at least not in a short period of time, the requirements are still increasing. But in the long run, many independent innovations come from bold assumptions.