2024 PCB Industry Special Report II

2024 PCB Industry Special Report II

MacroeconomICs and Downstream Innovation Are Core Influencing Factors of the PCB Cycle

① Global Macroeconomics: The demand for the PCB industry is positively correlated with the macroeconomic environment. PCBs are fundamental components in the electronics industry, and electronic products have become ubiquitous consumer goods in daily life. By comparing the year-on-year growth rates of global Pcb Production value and global GDP, we find a significant positive correlation between the two.

② Industry Technological Breakthroughs: PCBs are already a highly mature product with little room for substantial technological innovation, making this factor a relatively minor influence. The term "PCB" first appeared in 1925; in the 1980s, suRFace mount technology gradually replaced through-hole mount technology as the mainstream; CAD software emerged and rapidly developed in 1984; the PCB industry matured in the 1990s; in 1993, Motorola applied for a BGA packaging patent, leading to the emergence of organic packaging substrates; in 1995, Panasonic developed HDI; by 2000, PCB line widths/spaces entered the 3.5-4.5mil range, and FPC emerged; in 2006, Any-Layer HDI appeared, and since then, there have been almost no major product innovations in PCB products.

③ Downstream Innovation and Growth: Key application areas of PCBs include PCs, mobile phones, communications, etc., and their innovative iterations directly drive PCB demand. The growth of the PCB industry at different stages has been driven by desktops in the 1990s, laptops in the 2000s, smartphones around 2010, and large-scale construction of 5G base stations since 2020.

III. One of the Influencing Factors of This Current Major Cycle – AI

Requirements of Traditional Servers for PCBs

Upgrades to server platforms necessitate increased PCB layer counts and reduced CCL dielectric losses. The applications of PCBs in servers mainly include accelerator boards, motherboards, power backplanes, hard drive backplanes, network cards, Riser cards, etc., characterized by high layer counts, high aspect ratios, high densities, and high transmission rates.

Increased PCB Layer Counts: With the evolution of server platforms, server PCBs continue to develop towards higher layer counts. Purely server platforms corresponding to PCIe 3.0 generally use 8-12-layer PCB motherboards; however, Whitley's PCIe 4.0 bus requires 12-16-layer PCBs; and for the future Eagle Stream platform using PCIe 5.0, PCB layer counts need to reach above 16-18 layers. According to Prismark data, the unit price of PCBs with 18 or more layers is approximately three times that of 12-16-layer PCBs.
Global Server Compound Annual Growth Rate of 8%

The global server market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 8% from 2022 to 2027. According to IDC data, global server shipments in 2022 reached 14.95 million units, up 10.4% year-on-year. The global server market size in 2022 was 123billion,up20.0178 billion in 2027, corresponding to a CAGR of 7.7% from 2022 to 2027.