PCB News - PCB industry development potential gradually revealed

The structure of PCB products is complex, and the product categories continue to evolve according to terminal needs: terminal electronic products change in light, short, and multi-functional requirements to promote the rapid improvement of electronic component product performance and integration.

Generally speaking, from single and double panels, multi-layer boards, HDI boards (low-level - high-level), any layer of interconnection panels, to SLP-type carriers, packaging substrates, more and more integration, design and processing more complex . Multilayer boards, FPC, and HDI boards are the main force in the market and are the space for growth of high-end PCB products. According to Prismark's statistics, in 2017, multi-layer boards, FPC, and HDI boards accounted for 74% of the total PCB market. It is estimated that by 2021, the compound growth of FPC, HDI and multi-layer boards will reach 3%, 2.8% and 2.4% respectively.

The cycle of various products in PCB is mainly related to terminal requirements. Driven by the increase in raw material prices and changes in downstream demand in 2017, the global PCB market has shown an unexpected growth trend. The annual output growth rate is as high as 8.6%, which exceeds the overall growth of electronic system products and far exceeds the growth of GDP.

The demand for driving the downstream PCB market in 2017 mainly comes from:

1

The unit price of high-end intelligent machine innovation and upgrade has increased, stimulating the increase in the output value of the entire PCB market.

The internal design of Apple iPhoneX has changed, and the motherboard adopts a more advanced MSAP stacking scheme, which has nearly tripled the value of a single machine, up to more than $20. The comprehensive screen, 3D induction and other innovative appearance and functional components directly enhance the demand for rigid bonding boards and flexible FPC boards, and the value of FPC boards has increased to more than 40 US dollars.

Other non-flat smartphones quickly followed Apple's innovation after launching new products, and vigorously promoted the new concepts of full-screen, 3D sensing, wireless charging and other applications.

Although the overall growth of smartphone shipments is still declining, the value of stand-alone components has increased rapidly, driving the output value of mobile phone boards to increase beyond expectations.

2 The upsurge of virtual currency mining has driven a surge in demand from mining motherboards and chip operators.

In 2017, the price of virtual currencies led by Bitcoin and Ethereum soared. The price of Bitcoin doubled 14 times in the entire 17 years. The supply of upstream mining equipment was in short supply, and the price of mining machines followed the investment boom.

The cost of a mining machine consists of a motherboard and a chip. The motherboard circuit board is mainly a 4-layer, 6-layer, and 8-layer multi-layer board. The price of ordinary multi-layer boards is 600-800 yuan per square meter, and the price of multi-layer boards for Bitcoin motherboards is per square meter. Rice increased to 1200-1500 yuan, and this type of sheet is mostly supplied by domestic low-end sheet manufacturers.

Although the PCB market is generally expected to be unsustainable, it has a significant impact on PCB performance in the short term. The monthly demand exceeds 560,000 square meters. By 2017, the annual mining machine board market size is about US$1.24 billion.

The service/storage market in the computer field is beginning to improve, pushing the output of the entire computer system to further expand. As cloud, data center and artificial intelligence now require huge storage space and powerful computing power, with the penetration of the Internet of Things, the service/storage market will develop rapidly in the future.

Computer PCB is mainly based on graphics card 6-16 layer multi-layer board and memory chip packaging substrate. In the short term, the impact of Apple's mobile phones on PCB output and technology will continue until 2018. SLP-level operators have become the trend of high-end mobile phone motherboards. FPC Flexible Board will continue to improve the loading rate of new mobile phones in 2018, but Due to the rapid expansion of production capacity, the newly scratched adhesive board market,

In the first half of 2018, consumption of raw inventory was the main focus. The demand for storage, server graphics cards and IC packaging substrates continues to improve. In the medium and long term, in the stage of steady economic growth, the third large-scale development of the PCB industry will be the further penetration of automotive electronics, as well as 5G, AI and other technologies to promote communications, consumer electronics, computers and other fields in the resonance era.

Since 2021, the development potential of the PCB industry has been continuously being explored, and the room for progress has been considerable.