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 fabrication industry. The industry generally believes that in the next three to five years, 5G communication will surpass today’s two major application markets of smart terminals and automotive electronics, and become the first engine driving the growth of the PCB industry.
In the context of the double decline in the growth rate of the global electronics market and global PCB fabrication output value, the annual growth rate of China’s PCB output value is higher than that of the world, and the proportion of total output value in the world has also increased significantly. It is obvious that China has become the largest producer in the global PCB industry. China, so China’s PCB industry is in a good state to welcome the arrival of 5G communication! 5G communication has an increasing impact on people’s lives, and newly developed mobile phones will also step into the 5G era little by little. So, what are the challenges that 5G communication brings to the PCB fabrication process?
1.Requirements for materials: A very clear direction for 5G communication PCBs is high-frequency and high-speed materials and PCB fabrication. 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 deploy high-frequency PCBs and launched a series of new materials. This will break the current dominance of Rogers in the field of high-frequency sheet materials. 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.
2. Requirements for quality monitoring: Due to the increase of 5G signal rate, the deviation of board making has a greater impact on signal performance, which requires stricter control of production deviation of board making, while the existing mainstream board making process and equipment update It will become a bottleneck for future technological development. How PCB fabrication companies break through is crucial.
3. Requirements for process technology: The function improvement of 5G-related products will increase the demand for high-density PCB fabrication, and HDI will also become an important technical field. Multi-stage HDI products and even any parallel interconnection products will be popularized, and new technologies such as buried resistors and buried capacitors will be more and more applied. The uniformity of copper thickness in PCB fabrication, the accuracy of line width, the alignment between layers, the control accuracy of back-drilling depth of intermediary thickness, and the ability of plasma desmearing are all worthy of further study.
4. Requirements for PCB design: The selection of boards should meet the requirements of high frequency and high speed, and the impedance matching, stacking planning, wiring spacing/holes, etc. should meet the requirements of signal integrity. Start with the six aspects of frequency phase/amplitude mixed pressure heat dissipation and PIM.
5. Requirements for equipment and instruments: high-precision equipment and pre-treatment lines with less roughening of copper surfaces are currently ideal manufacturing equipment; and testing equipment includes passive intermodulation testers, flying probe impedance testers, and loss testers. equipment etc. Precise graphic transfer and vacuum etching equipment, detection equipment for line width and coupling spacing that can monitor and feed back data changes in real time; electroplating equipment with good uniformity, high-precision lamination equipment, etc. can also meet the needs of 5G communication PCB fabrication.