PCB News - The development of 5G PCB

The development of 5G PCB

Compared with our current 4G and 5G, the download speed is up to 1.25GB per second, one high-definition movie per second. The arrival of 5G is the beginning of the real interconnection of everything. 5G will complete the interconnection of everything in the world. With the advent of the 5G era, PCB manufacturing for communications will also usher in a great time!

PCB is the Printed Circuit Board(Printed Circuit Board), known as the "mother of electronic products." All electronic equipment or products need to be equipped with PCB boards, so that its downstream demand is continuous and stable, and its industrial development level can be to a certain extent Reflect the development speed and technological level of a country or region's electronic information industry.

In the past 10 years, the global PCB industry has maintained an average annual compound growth rate of about 4%. In 2017, the global PCB output value was 58.8 billion U.S. dollars, a year-on-year growth rate of 8.60%, and China's PCB output value was 29.7 billion U.S. dollars, a year-on-year growth rate of 9.70%, which was higher than the global growth rate. From the perspective of the regional distribution of PCB output value, the focus of the PCB industry is constantly shifting to the Asian region. China has become the most important player in the global 5G PCB, accounting for more than 50% of the global PCB output value.

The upstream of 5GPCB is a variety of raw materials for PCB production, mainly including copper clad laminates, copper foils, copper balls, prepregs, gold salts, inks, dry films and other chemical materials. The main raw materials for flexible circuit boards also include cover films, electromagnetic films, etc.

The downstream is mainly used in the fields of computers, communication equipment, industrial control, automotive electronics, consumer electronics and aerospace, covering a very wide range. Among them, communications, computers, and consumer electronics are the three most important application terminals in the PCB industry, with demand accounting for 27%, 27%, and 14% respectively, which directly affect the development of the upstream PCB industry.

Due to the high-speed and high-frequency characteristics of 5G, as far as a single base station is concerned, the value of the communication board will also be greatly improved. On the one hand, with the increase in 5G frequency bands and the increase in frequency, the number of RF front-end components has increased significantly, and the integration of Massive MIMO on the AAU, the use of PCB area on the AAU has greatly increased, and the number of layers has increased. Copper plate transfer; on the other hand, with the substantial increase in 5G transmission data, there are higher requirements for the data processing capacity of the base station BBU. The BBU will use a larger area and higher layer number of PCBs, and the substrate needs to use high-speed and high-frequency materials. According to conservative calculations, the PCB value of a single 5G macro base station is more than twice that of 4G.

Compared with 4G, the number of 5G base stations will increase. According to the public data of China’s three major telecom operators, in 2016, China Mobile, China Telecom, and China Unicom added 400,000, 380,000 and 340,000 4G base stations, respectively, increasing the total number To 1.51 million, 890,000, and 740,000, for a total of about 3.14 million. According to estimates, the number of small base stations in the future will be more than 10 times that of the current base station market.

According to industry research, there are at least 20 FPC part numbers in the new Apple mobile phones, with a value of more than US$20. Tablet products are also expected to be further thinner and thinner, and FPC products will be used in large numbers. At the same time, domestic leading brands such as Huawei, OPPO, and vivo have also increased their FPC usage to 10-12 yuan. ipcb is a high-precision, high-quality PCB manufacturer, such as: isola 370hr PCB, high-frequency PCB, high-speed PCB, ic substrate, ic test board, impedance PCB, HDI PCB, Rigid-Flex PCB, buried blind PCB, advanced PCB, microwave PCB, telfon PCB and other ipcb are good at PCB manufacturing.