Printed circuit boards are the mother of electronic products, and profound changes in the downstream consumer market will directly affect the development trajectory of the PCB industry.
The industry generally believes that in the next three to five years, 5G communications will surpass today’s two major application markets of smart terminals and automotive electronics, and become the number one engine driving the growth of the PCB industry.
What is worthy of pride is that, against the backdrop of both declining growth rates in the global electronics market and global PCB output value, China’s PCB output value has grown faster than the world every year, and its proportion of total output value in the world has also increased significantly. It is obvious that China has become the global PCB market leader.
As the largest producer of the industry, China’s PCB industry is in a better position to welcome the arrival of 5G communications!
5G communications have an increasing impact on people’s lives, and newly developed mobile phones will also enter the 5G era bit by bit.
Challenges of 5G communication to PCB processing technology
- Requirements for PCB design: The selection of board materials must meet the requirements of high frequency and high speed. The impedance matching, stacking planning, wiring spacing/holes, etc. must meet the signal integrity requirements. Specifically, they can be considered from the aspects of loss, embedding, high Start with six aspects: frequency phase/amplitude, mixed voltage, heat dissipation, and PIM.
- Requirements for equipment and instruments: High-precision equipment and pre-processing lines with less roughening of the copper surface are currently ideal processing equipment; and test equipment includes passive intermodulation testers, flying probe impedance testers, and loss tests. Equipment etc. Precision pattern transfer and vacuum etching equipment, line width and coupling spacing detection equipment that can monitor and feedback data changes in real time; electroplating equipment with good uniformity, high-precision lamination equipment, etc. can also meet the production needs of 5G communication PCBs .
- Requirements for materials: A very clear direction for 5G communication PCB is high-frequency and high-speed materials and board manufacturing. In terms of high-frequency materials, it can be clearly seen that leading material manufacturers in the traditional high-speed field such as Lianmao and Panasonic have begun to lay out high-frequency plates and launched a series of new materials. This will break the current dominance of Rogers in the field of high-frequency panels. After healthy competition, the performance, convenience, and availability of materials will be greatly enhanced. Therefore, the localization of high-frequency materials is an inevitable trend.
- Requirements for process technology: The functional improvements of 5G-related application products will increase the demand for high-density PCBs, and HDI will also become an important technical field. Multi-stage HDI products and even products interconnected in any order will be promoted, and new processes such as buried resistance and buried capacity will be increasingly used. PCB copper thickness uniformity, line width accuracy, inter-layer alignment, inter-layer dielectric thickness, control accuracy of back drilling depth, and plasma drilling and contamination removal capabilities are all worthy of in-depth study.
- Requirements for quality monitoring: Due to the increase in 5G signal rate, board manufacturing deviations have a greater impact on signal performance, which requires stricter control over board production deviations, and the existing mainstream board manufacturing processes and equipment have to be updated. Not big, it will become a bottleneck for future technological development. How PCB processing companies break the situation is crucial.