Will PCB be replaced by chips in the future?

Will PCB be replaced by chips in the future? There are hidden worries behind the prosperity

As China has become the most important industrial base in the world, related upstream industries have gradually shifted to China, and the PCB industry is one of them. At the same time, with the vigorous development of new energy vehicles, 5G and other new technologies, higher requirements are also placed on PCBs. As an important electronic component, its role is becoming more and more prominent at present.

Since 2006, China's PCB output value has surpassed Japan to become the world's largest production base, and in 2020, the output value will account for 53.8% of the world's. Interestingly, although the global PCB market shows a certain cyclicality, China's PCB output value is constantly rising. In 2020, the output value of the domestic PCB board industry will exceed 35 billion US dollars. However, under the prosperity, there is a saying in the market that the PCB will be replaced by chips in the future, and where will the PCB market go?

New energy vehicles and 5G market development drive PCB demand to rise

Known as the "mother of electronic components", PCB is a bridge that carries electronic components and connects circuits. However, in the past two years, the Sino-US trade conflict and the new crown epidemic have caused a huge impact on the semiconductor industry. Avoided has been affected to some extent.

According to industry sources, judging from the current feedback from the terminal market and supply chain, the current demand for PCBs is actually rising, including 5G, smart homes, and new energy vehicles. Taking new energy vehicles as an example, the demand for PCBs will be 4-5 times that of traditional vehicles, and the overall market demand is strong.

At the same time, due to the shortage of chips in the market, the progress of many customers' products is not as expected, including the assembly of PCBs and the production of finished products in the later stage.

Lin Chaowen, technical director of Indavinuo, believes that due to the shortage of chips, the price increase has lasted for a long time. Many domestic electronics companies have responded by localizing or replacing chips. A large number of products require PCB revision design, and some PCB factories have also passed Free proofing has enhanced the enthusiasm of many enterprises and college teachers and students for PCB proofing, but has brought a certain degree of growth to the PCB manufacturing market.

Although the demand for PCBs in new energy vehicles has greatly increased, due to the use of large-capacity batteries in new energy vehicles, the current in the circuit becomes larger, and the current carrying design and thermal design become critical, and the PCB is more concerned about reliability. design, but from a performance standpoint, the biggest impact on reliability is heat generation. Therefore, it is necessary to control the heat from the IC package, through the PCB, to the complete product in the operating environment.

In addition, new energy vehicles are also equipped with technologies such as autonomous driving, radar, and smart cockpit. Compared with traditional vehicles, the PCB design is much more complicated, and to achieve these rich functions, the rate requirements of the signals carried by the PCB will be higher. , and there may be a demand for HDI boards on smart cockpits. At the same time, new energy vehicles are usually equipped with many camera modules, which requires more flexible and rigid boards.

In addition to new energy vehicles, high-end PCB manufacturing for integrated circuit supporting industries, such as semiconductor testing equipment, will usher in a process of rapid growth in the future, and this field was mainly occupied by the United States, Japan, South Korea and other countries in the past.

In the field of display technology, especially the next-generation active light-emitting LED, the backlight module of the backlight module is usually as large as the screen and the PCB. And this kind of display equipment is usually used in monitoring large screens, outdoor advertising screens and other fields, and the current market demand is also rising.

In the field of 5G and smartphones, Lin Chaowen said that 5G is mainly reflected in the design considerations of PCB materials and signal transmission quality. Compared with 4G, 5G has higher speed, larger capacity and lower latency. It also brings "heat" to 5G base stations and terminals

The problem is deeply concerned by the industry. In the field of smartphones, 5G mobile phones have been continuously upgraded in the direction of high performance, high screen quality, high integration, and thinness. Compared with the 4G era, the heat generation has increased significantly, and the heat dissipation demand has also increased significantly. More energy-efficient devices and more effective PCB cooling solutions are urgently needed in circuit design in the 5G field.

It can be seen that with the current development of new energy vehicles, 5G, new display technology, semiconductor testing and other fields, the demand for PCBs in the domestic market is also rising, and due to technological upgrades, PCB design has also raised higher standards. Require.

What is a good PCB

The PCB industry has developed for such a long time, and now there are some new changes in PCB design. One is more miniaturization, which is mainly driven by the portability requirements of smart devices; the other is the transformation of PCBs from traditional rigid boards to rigid-flex boards. And when the PCB is moving towards the high-end, there are two main aspects, one is that the data carrying and transmission rate are getting higher and higher, and the other is that for smart home and wearable devices, the demand for HDI is becoming more and more obvious.

Users' requirements for PCB are also getting higher and higher. Lin Chaowen said that higher speed, smaller size and faster time to market are both challenges and opportunities for PCB design. For customers, on the premise of meeting performance indicators, it is better to have a faster design delivery time.

A good PCB needs to meet signal integrity, power integrity and compliance with electromagnetic compatibility design, which are mainly reflected in circuit performance. At the level that the user can see with the naked eye, an excellent PCB work should be dense in layout, neat and symmetrical, and take into account the aesthetics of the layout. At the same time, the user's operating habits are taken into account, for example, the sockets on the panel are arranged reasonably, which is convenient for plugging and unplugging, and there are clear safety instructions.

From the perspective of industry standards, a good PCB must first meet the performance requirements of users, and at the same time, it can also meet the standards in terms of reliability, and it is best to have certain advantages in cost. Of course, for different products, the emphasis on the above three points will also be different.

Chips will replace PCBs?

Although there is a strong demand for PCBs in the market today, many new technologies also put forward higher requirements for PCB design. However, there is a saying in the market that with the integration trend of hardware and software, the application will become more and more simple, and the original need to build a complex circuit can now be solved with only one chip. If all this is true, the PCB boom today is nothing but a bubble.

However, for this statement, Lin Chaowen said that although the chip integration is getting higher and higher, it is impossible to replace the PCB in the short term, and the basic support still needs to be achieved through the PCB. For example, the SoC of a mobile phone integrates a series of modules including CPU, GPU, DDR, etc., which can be regarded as the full integration of modules that could only be implemented on one PCB before.

However, there are still some problems. For example, even in the 5nm era, the SoC cannot independently integrate all the chips of the mobile phone on the premise of ensuring its own content; at the same time, even if the chips are integrated together, the problem of heat accumulation of small chips is still a problem at present. Difficulties, such as the heating problem of the Snapdragon 888, even the Apple A14 cannot solve the heating problem; in addition, making the high-density chip larger to integrate the PCB content will reduce the yield, so it is better to put it directly on the PCB.

According to industry insiders, there is indeed a trend of chip integration. For example, mobile phone chips have integrated baseband and other related devices, which greatly reduces the motherboard area of mobile phones. But what needs to be seen is that when these chips are highly integrated, miniaturization and thinning need to be pursued, while ensuring that their performance meets the requirements.

From some aspects, the production of the product motherboard is even more difficult. At the same time, it is difficult for some PCB external interfaces to be integrated into the chip, and how to access USB has become a problem. In some high-reliability products, there are fewer applications. The cost of the product and the corresponding demand issues need to be considered. Therefore, for a long time in the future, the demand for traditional PCBs will still maintain a growing trend.

However, an illusion can be made here, since PCBs are mainly based on insulator-loaded conductor lines, while chips are based on semiconductors. So whether semiconductors can be used as materials to manufacture PCB boards in the future, of course, this involves the price of raw materials, as well as signal impedance characteristics, as well as physical issues such as durability, heat dissipation, and distortion.

But if it can be realized, then this PCB board made of semiconductors can also be regarded as a PCB-sized chip.

Epilogue

Judging from the market in recent years, China's PCB industry is still developing rapidly, and with the emergence of applications such as 5G, new energy vehicles, and new display technologies, new challenges have been raised for PCBs. At the same time, the maturity of the industry has also created the needs of third-party PCB designers. By connecting the original factory and PCB manufacturers, a cost-effective mass production solution is finally formed. As for whether chips will replace PCBs in the future, at least not in the short term, and demand is still growing. But in the long run, many innovations come from bold assumptions.