PCB News - The origin of printed circuit boards

Printed circuit board,also known as printed wiring boards, are providers of electrical connections for electronic components. Its development has a history of more than 100 years; its design is mainly layout design; the main advantage of using circuit boards is to greatly reduce wiring and assembly errors, and improve the level of automation and production labor rate.

According to the number of circuit boards, it can be divided into single-sided boards, double-sided boards, four-layer boards, six-layer boards and other multilayer circuit boards.

Since the circuit board is not a general terminal product, the definition of the name is a little confusing. For example, the motherboard used in personal computers is called the main board, and cannot be directly called the circuit board. Although there are circuit boards in the main board, They are not the same, so when evaluating the industry, the two are related but cannot be said to be the same. Another example: because there are integrated circuit parts mounted on the circuit board, the news media call it an IC board, but in fact it is not the same as a printed circuit board. We usually say that the printed circuit board refers to the bare board-that is, the circuit board without upper components.

History of printed circuit boards
Before the advent of printed circuit boards, the interconnection between electronic components relied on the direct connection of wires to form a complete circuit. In the contemporary era, the circuit panel only exists as an effective experimental tool, and the printed circuit board has become an absolute dominant position in the electronics industry.

At the beginning of the 20th century, in order to simplify the production of electronic equipment, reduce the wiring between electronic parts, and reduce production costs, people began to delve into the method of replacing wiring with printing. Over the past 30 years, engineers have repeatedly proposed to use metal conductors for wiring on insulated substrates. The most successful was in 1925, Charles Ducas of the United States printed circuit patterns on an insulating substrate, and then used electroplating to successfully establish conductors for wiring.

It wasn't until 1936 that the Austrian Paul Eisler published his foil technology in the UK, where he used printed circuit boards in radio sets, while in Japan, Yoshinosuke Miyamoto successfully patented the spray-attached wiring method, the ‘Metallic Wiring Method (Patent No. 119384)’. Of these two methods, Paul Eisler's method is the most similar to today's printed circuit boards. This method is known as subtraction, where unnecessary metals are removed, while Charles Dukas and Kinosuke Miyamoto's method adds only the required metals. This wiring method is known as addition. Even so, it wasn't officially practical due to the fact that the electronic components of the time generated a lot of heat and it was difficult to use substrates for both together, but it did take printed circuit technology a step further.

Printed circuit board development
In the past ten years, my country's printed circuit board manufacturing industry has developed rapidly, and its total output value and total output have both ranked first in the world. Due to the rapid development of electronic products, price wars have changed the structure of the supply chain. China has both industrial distribution, cost and market advantages, and has become the world's most important printed circuit board production base.

PCB has developed from single-layer to double-sided boards,multilayer boards and flexible boards, and continue to develop in the direction of high precision, high density and high reliability. Continuously shrinking volume, reducing costs, and improving performance have enabled printed circuit boards to maintain strong vitality in the development of electronic products in the future.

The development trend of future printed circuit board manufacturing technology is to develop in the direction of high density,high precision,fine aperture,fine wire,small pitch, high reliability, multilayer, high-speed transmission, light weight, and thinness in performance.