PCB News - Printed circuit boards: make smart products smarter

In the era when smart phones are king, how to make them thinner and smaller, while the "brains" are smart enough to have more functions. This is the expectation of many people and the bottleneck in the advancement of related processes.

Now, this problem has been gradually overcome by Zhang Huaiwu, a professor at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China. Over the years, Zhang Huaiwu has led a team to work on the "printed electronics" project to overcome the bottleneck problem of electronic information products including smart phones.

Now, after the United States and Japan, China has become the third country in the world to master the core technologies of "high-density interconnection hybrid integrated printed circuits" and "printed composite electronic materials and integrated embedded devices". In this process, China's high-end four-generation printed PCB industry grew from scratch, from weak to strong, and enabled China's "intelligent manufacturing" to occupy a considerable proportion of the international market share.

Scientific problems need to be solved urgently

Where there is electronic information, there must be a printed circuit board. China is a big country in the production of printed circuits. However, most of my country's printed circuit products have no intellectual property rights, low technical content, and simple processing products. "High-tech, high-value-added cutting-edge products are monopolized by foreign printed circuit manufacturers." Zhang Huaiwu said.

The high integration, miniaturization, lightness, and multi-function of modern electronic equipment require printed circuit boards to develop in the direction of the fourth generation of high-density, high-reliability, high thermal conductivity, and anti-electromagnetic interference. Take the smartphone as an example. To make it smaller, more agile, and smarter, it requires a more refined structure in its body. Zhang Huaiwu said that printed electronics is the key to solving this problem, and it is also the most cutting-edge technology in related fields in the world.

The leap from "printed PCB" to "printed electronics" is an international milestone scientific issue, and the fourth generation of high-density integrated printed circuit Related materials and technologies such as heat conduction and heat dissipation pose severe challenges.

However, this key technology has been monopolized by the United States and Japan for a long time, and related industries in China have also been constrained by others because of backward technology.

Ten years to break the foreign technology blockade

Based on the State Key Laboratory of Electronic Thin Films and Integrated Devices, Zhang Huaiwu’s team has long been committed to the research on the fourth-generation high-density integrated printed circuit technology.

After the establishment of the high-density interconnection hybrid integrated printed circuit technology project, Zhang Huaiwu was responsible for the overall planning and design of the project. On the basis of experiments, he led the team to develop a composite dual performance material for the first time in the world, put forward a theoretical model of film magnetic circuit and circuit closure, and realized inductors, antennas, EMI devices, capacitors and resistors with magnetic cores. The surface printing and plating completely solves the technical indicators of increasing the density of lines and devices per unit area of the fourth-generation circuit boards.

What is another member of the team. He and his colleagues broke through the technical bottleneck of the interconnection of any layer of the printed circuit board, and established the fluid dynamics theoretical model for fine circuit production for the first time in the world, and realized the world's highest level of line width/line distance announced by the IPC Association of the United States, and solved the printed circuit The problem of high-density wiring.

This series of innovative achievements indicates that my country has mastered the core technology of high-density interconnection hybrid integrated printed circuits, and even surpassed the highest levels of Japan and the United States in many indicators.

"We have been working on this technology for ten years." Zhang Huaiwu said that the team started from the most basic printed electronics theory, high thermal conductivity organic materials, etc., and gradually went deep into components, circuits, heat dissipation and heat conduction, electromagnetic interference, and packaging systems. Waiting, step by step, finally embarked on a path of independent innovation.

Boost domestic industrial upgrading

The series of achievements of Zhang Huaiwu and others with independent intellectual property rights have laid a solid foundation for the industrialization of printed electronics. However, they did not wait for all conditions to be met before starting to connect with the market, but started strategic cooperation with related companies during the development process.

As early as 2002, the team took the initiative to move the industrial front to Guangdong, and carried out school-enterprise cooperation from zero distance, combining technology accumulation with the production of "real knives and real guns", and successively cooperated with Zhuhai Fangzheng, Zhuhai Yuansheng and other enterprises., Thus kicking off the prelude to the industrialization of China's "high-density interconnection hybrid integrated printed circuit technology".

The cooperation with Zhuhai Founder is quite representative. From the line width of more than 100 microns to the line width of 25 microns today, the two parties have cooperated to build my country’s first high-density interconnected hybrid integrated printed circuit production platform with the highest technology level and the best equipment, which is fully compatible with the United States and Japanese companies are shoulder to shoulder. From January 2011 to December 2013, Zhuhai Founder produced a series of printed circuit board products and added a total output value of 3.2 billion yuan, which produced good economic and social benefits.

"The establishment of industry-university-research research and development platforms at all levels can lead to sustainable development," He Wei said with emotion after reviewing the experience of industry-university-research cooperation. develop.