PCB News - ​What is the potential of the FPC board industry?

Mobile electronic products such as smartphones are booming, and the market for new consumer electronics products such as wearable smart devices and drones is also rapidly rising. The trend of device miniaturization and miniaturization is becoming more and more obvious. Traditional PCBs can no longer meet the requirements of products. Therefore, major manufacturers have begun to study new technologies to replace PCBs. Among them, FPC, as the most popular technology, is becoming the main connection component of electronic equipment.

Text label: FPC

In the past ten years, China's electronic information industry has developed rapidly and the scale of the industry has continued to expand. China has become the world's largest consumer electronics market, and the upstream and downstream industrial chain fully matches the needs of the PCB industry. Mobile electronic products such as smartphones are booming, and the market for new consumer electronics products such as wearable smart devices and drones is also rapidly rising. The trend of device miniaturization and miniaturization is becoming more and more obvious. Traditional PCBs can no longer meet the requirements of products.

Therefore, major manufacturers have begun to study new technologies to replace PCBs. Among them, FPC, as the most popular technology, is becoming the main connection component of electronic equipment.

FPC is the fastest growing sub-industry in PCB. FPC is a high-reliability and high-flexibility printed circuit board, which is made of flexible copper laminate. It is used to connect the substrate of electronic parts and is also the signal transmission medium of electronic products.

As an important category of PCB, FPC has the advantages of high wiring density, light weight, thin thickness, foldable, bending resistance, high temperature resistance, three-dimensional wiring, etc., which is more in line with the development trend of smart portable electronic products in the downstream industry and will be widely used. .

FPC has obvious advantages in smart phone display module, touch module, fingerprint recognition module, side button, power button, etc. The new iPhone uses about 14-16 pieces of FPC and other PCB materials, which together account for $15 of the cost. Domestic mobile phone manufacturers such as Huawei, Oppo, and Euro Sports have also increased the use of FPCs in high-end flagship phones. At present, the number of FPCs is about 10-12. It is expected that future consumption will continue to increase under the high-end trend.

Although the growth rate of the mobile phone market has slowed down, the domestic smartphone market share continues to rise, HOV, Xiaomi and other collective breakthroughs, Samsung's market share continues to decline, Apple's share has encountered a bottleneck and withstood the impact of the wave. The rise of domestic mobile phone manufacturers is expected to bring explosive growth in the field of flexible mobile phones to FPC.

With the rise of the global wearable device market, large international electronic equipment manufacturers such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc. have increased their investment in wearable devices And research and development efforts. Other industry leaders from domestic companies such as Baidu, Tencent, Qihoo 360, and Xiaomi also launched wearable devices. The performance characteristics of FPC meet the requirements of wearable devices and become the first choice for wearable devices. Therefore, the rapid development of new FPC terminal products such as wearable devices will also continue to expand the application field of FPC.