Feedback from the current terminal equipment sales market and its supply chain management indicates that the demand for printed circuit boards is actually increasing, including 5G, smart home systems, and new energy vehicles. In addition to new energy vehicles, the industrial chain of integrated circuit chip auxiliary facilities, such as advanced PCB production and semiconductor material testing instrument manufacturing, will also enter a period of rapid growth in the future. This industry was previously mainly dominated by the UK, Japan, South Korea, and China.

　　As China has become a globally important industrial park, upstream and downstream industrial chains are gradually migrating to mainland China, and the printed circuit board field is one of them. At the same time, with the rapid development of new technologies such as new energy vehicles and 5G, printed circuit boards have obviously put forward higher requirements. As a key electronic device component, its effectiveness is even more prominent today.

　　Since 2006, China's annual PCB output value has surpassed Japan's, becoming one of the world's largest manufacturing bases. In 2020, its output value accounted for 53.8% of the global total. Interestingly, although the global PCB sales market shows a certain regularity, China's annual PCB output value has continued to soar. In 2020, the annual output value of China's PCB board industry will exceed US\$35 billion. However, under this prosperity, there is a rumor in the sales market that PCBs will be replaced by integrated circuits in the future. Where will the PCB sales market go?

　　 The development trends of the new energy vehicle and 5G sales markets have driven an increase in PCB demand.

　　Printed circuit boards are known as the mother of electronic components and are the bridge for installing electronic components and connecting power circuits. However, in recent years, contradictions such as the trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic have brought a huge impact to the semiconductor industry, and printed circuit boards have inevitably suffered damage.

　　Professionals say that from the feedback from the current terminal equipment sales market and its supply chain management, the current demand for printed circuit boards is actually increasing, including 5G, smart home systems, and new energy vehicles. Taking new energy vehicles as an example, the total demand for printed circuit boards will be 4-5 times that of traditional vehicles, and the overall market demand is sufficient.

　　At the same time, due to the shortage of integrated circuits in the sales market, the progress of many customers' products cannot meet expectations, including PCB assembly and the later stages of finished product production.

　　Due to the prolonged shortage and price increase of integrated circuits, many domestic electronic technology companies are relying on domestic products or replacing integrated circuits to solve the problem. Many products require that the PCB weight does not exceed the design drawing, and some PCB factories also use the completely free sample making method, which has increased the enthusiasm of many enterprises and college students for PCB sample making, and has brought a certain degree of improvement to the PCB production and sales market.

　　Although the demand for printed circuit boards in new energy vehicles is rapidly increasing, due to the selection of large-capacity lithium batteries, the current in the power circuit has increased, and the current-carrying design scheme and thermal design have become increasingly important. Printed circuit boards pay more attention to the optimization of structural design, but from the characteristics, the point that threatens stability is combustion. Therefore, it is necessary to gradually move towards practicality from integrated circuit packaging to integrated circuit boards and then to detailed products in the software environment.

　　In addition, new energy vehicles are also equipped with technologies such as autonomous driving, radar detection, and intelligent cockpits. Compared with traditional vehicles, their PCB design schemes are much more complex. To achieve this colorful effect, higher requirements are placed on the speed of PCB installation data signals, and HDI boards are very likely to appear in the intelligent cockpit. At the same time, new energy vehicles generally carry a large number of camera modules, which requires a large number of soft-hard fusion boards.

　　In addition to new energy vehicles, the industrial chain of supporting facilities for integrated circuit chips, such as advanced PCB production and semiconductor material testing instrument manufacturing, will also enter a period of rapid growth in the future. In the past, this industry was mainly dominated by the UK, Japan, South Korea, and China.

　　Moreover, in the optoelectronic technology industry, especially the next generation of active LEDs, the number of backlight modules is generally equivalent to the number of PCBs, and this display system is generally used in industries such as monitoring large screens and outdoor advertising screens. The current market demand is surging.

　　Lin Zhaowen said in the 5G and smart phone industry that the key to 5G lies in the consideration of PCB raw materials and the design of data signal transmission quality. Compared with 5G, 4G is faster, larger, and has lower latency. Similarly, the burn issue caused by 5G communication base stations and terminal equipment has also attracted widespread attention. In the smartphone industry, 5G phones are constantly upgrading in terms of excellent performance, high display quality, high integration, and lightweight design. Compared with the 4G era, the heat generation has increased significantly, and the heat dissipation requirements have also increased significantly. In the circuit principle of the 5G industry, there is an urgent need for more environmentally friendly and energy-saving components and a more reasonable PCB heat dissipation scheme.

　　It can be seen that with the development trends of several industries such as new energy vehicles, 5G, new optoelectronic technology, and semiconductor material testing, the requirements of the Chinese sales market for printed circuit boards are also becoming increasingly higher. Due to technological upgrades, the design of printed circuit boards has also put forward significantly higher requirements.

　　 What is a good PCB?

　　The printed circuit board industry has developed for so long, and now the design of printed circuit boards has also undergone some new changes. One is miniaturization, which is mainly driven by the portability requirements of smart products; the second is the transformation of printed circuit boards from traditional rigid boards to soft-hard fusion boards. When printed circuit boards enter the high-end market, two key changes will occur. One is that the installation and transmission speed of data information is getting faster and faster, and the other is that the requirements of smart home systems and smart wearable devices are becoming more and more obvious.

　　Customers' requirements for printed circuit boards are getting higher and higher. Lin Chaowen said that faster, smaller, and faster time to market is both a challenge and an opportunity for printed circuit board design. For customers, on the premise of meeting performance parameters, they can have faster design scheme delivery times.

　　A good printed circuit board must achieve signal integrity, switching power supply consistency, and the key to electromagnetic compatibility test design lies in the characteristics of the power circuit. From the customer's point of view, the excellent workmanship of an excellent printed circuit board should be intimate, neat, symmetrical, reasonably arranged, beautiful, and generous. At the same time, it should also consider the actual operating habits of customers, such as the effective arrangement of power sockets on the control panel, convenient plugging and unplugging, and the establishment of safety signs.

　　From the perspective of national standards, a good PCB must first meet the customer's performance test scheme, and its stability must also meet the standards, and it must have a certain cost advantage. Naturally, the focus of the above three points will also be different for different products.

　 　Will integrated circuits replace PCBs?

　　Although the current sales market has high requirements for PCBs, and many new technologies have put forward higher requirements for PCB design. But there is a saying in the sales market that with the development trend of hardware configuration and mobile phone software integration, applications will become simpler and simpler. Now, only one integrated circuit is needed to build complex power circuits. If all this is realized, then the current PCB boom is just a bubble.

　　However, Lin Zhaowen said that although the processing speed of integrated ICs is getting faster and faster, it is unlikely to replace PCBs in the short term, but the basic support points still need to be completed according to PCBs. For example, the SoC on a mobile phone integrates a series of control modules, including CPU, GPU, DDR, etc., which can be regarded as integrating all the control modules that were previously completed on a single PCB.

　　However, some problems still exist. For example, even in the 5nm era, it is impossible for a SoC to integrate all the integrated circuits on a mobile phone while maintaining its own configuration; at the same time, even if the integrated circuits are integrated together, the heat dissipation problem of small integrated circuits is still a problem at this stage; in addition, increasing the size of high-density integrated circuits to integrate PCB content will reduce the product's pass rate, which is not as good as placing them on the PCB.

　　According to professionals, the integration of integrated circuits does have a development trend. For example, baseband chips and other related components have been integrated into mobile phone processors, greatly reducing the total area of the mobile phone computer motherboard. However, it must be noted that when integrating these integrated circuits, miniaturization and lightweight design must be pursued while ensuring that their characteristics meet the requirements.

　　To some extent, the difficulty of manufacturing commercial computer motherboards has increased. At the same time, it is difficult to guarantee some open PCB sockets, and how to connect USB in integrated circuits has become a problem. In some reliable products, it is used less. Product cost and corresponding requirements must be fully considered. Therefore, the demand for traditional PCBs will continue to grow for a long time in the future.

　　However, a false premise can be clearly pointed out here, because printed circuit boards mainly rely on conductors and insulators to carry conductive paths, while integrated circuits are manufactured based on semiconductor materials. Therefore, whether semiconductor materials can be used to produce PCB boards in the future will naturally involve physical problems such as the price of raw materials, impedance characteristics of data signal characteristics, durability, heat dissipation, and warping.

　　But if this can be achieved, a PCB board made of semiconductor materials can also be regarded as an integrated circuit the size of a PCB.

　　From the sales market in recent years, China's printed circuit board industry chain is still developing rapidly. With the application of 5G, new energy vehicles, and optoelectronic new technologies, new challenges have been put forward for printed circuit boards. At the same time, the improvement in this field also requires third-party printed circuit board designers to produce cost-effective mass production solutions according to the requirements of the original factory and printed circuit board manufacturers. Whether integrated circuits will replace printed circuit boards in the future, at least not in the short term, the requirements are constantly improving. But in the long run, many independent innovations come from bold ideas.