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Influenced by the 5g commercial potential, the communication orders in the second half of 2019 turned to decline and kept rising, which made the overall prosperity of domestic PCB improved. The major PCB manufacturers actively arranged 5g product lines, which led to a new wave of market upsurge of PCB.
A very clear direction of 5g PCB is high-frequency and high-speed material and manufacturing board. Therefore, as the substrate material in PCB manufacturing, the high-frequency and high-speed technology replacement and price trend of CCL are continuously concerned by the industry.
There are many opportunities in 5g scenario, the key is high frequency and high speed
Under the background of "no hot spot in the market" becoming the new normal, 5g communication has become the new driving force of PCB industry in China. In the short term, China is one of the global leaders in 5g standards and technologies. The large-scale construction and promotion of 5g communication base stations and mobile terminal products will inevitably promote the price and quantity of PCB required, and bring new technical challenges and demand elasticity to the whole industry. In the long run, the future value of 5g technology is embodied in "industry chain enabling", including cloud computing, big data, Internet of things, artificial intelligence and other new generation of information technology, which are expected to breed many new models and new formats on 5g, a new infrastructure, and then spawn more 5g hardware products.
As we all know, 5g hardware products are developing towards high-frequency high-speed, high integration, thin and miniaturization, which requires more and more space-saving designs such as smaller and smaller apertures in high-frequency high-speed PCB, larger and larger wiring density, and wiring between back holes. The PCB manufacturing and quality assurance of 5g hardware products will face great technical challenges. There are two ways to high-frequency and high-speed PCB, one is the higher processing requirements of PCB, the other is to use high-frequency and high-speed copper clad plate. However, due to the slow progress, high cost and difficult to realize, most PCB manufacturers prefer CCL high frequency.
Copper clad laminate (CCL) is the upstream core material of PCB manufacturing. It is a kind of plate-like material which is made of electronic glass fiber cloth or other reinforced materials soaked with resin, one or both sides covered with copper foil and hot pressed. It accounts for about 20% - 40% of PCB production cost, and has strong interdependence with PCB. At present, the global high-frequency and high-speed CCL is concentrated in the suppliers of the United States and Japan, including the three famous American giants Rogers, Taconic, Isola, Panasonic electric of Japan, etc. They all have higher technology research and development level and stronger downstream bargaining power, rarely limited by the cycle replacement of communication products, and their business revenue ability grows steadily.
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Phoebe Gao, marketing manager, Rogers
As a leader in the field of high frequency and special copper clad laminates, Rogers shared his new knowledge of the evolution of copper clad laminate technology in 5g era with international electronic business information. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), 5g has three major application scenarios, namely emmb (enhanced mobile bandwidth), mmtc (mass machine communication) and ulllc (ultra reliable low delay communication), according to Phoebe Gao, manager of market development department of Rogers. Among them, embB (enhanced mobile broadband, enhanced mobile broadband scene), that is, large traffic mobile broadband scene, is suitable for 3D HD video, AR / VR, etc., which is also the 5g application understood by ordinary consumers. Mmtc (massive machine type communications, large-scale Internet of things scenario), which actually opens a new application scenario, such as smart home, smart enterprise, smart city, etc. Urllc (ultra reliable and low latency Communications) will also open a huge market, such as driverless, Internet of vehicles, industrial automation, telemedicine, etc. This also means that 5g will quickly infiltrate all walks of life, bringing new changes to the industrial ecology.
"In general, 5g has a network transmission rate of more than 1000 times higher than 4G / LTE. Mass MIMO technology, the need for wider spectrum bandwidth and the use of millimeter wave band make 5g very different from 4G / LTE. " Phoebe Gao said, "for example, in 5g technology, the antenna system in the sub-6ghz frequency band is not much different from that in 4G, but the number, complexity and integration of 5g antennas are much higher than those in 4G. 5g antenna system uses more advanced mass MIMO technology, so that it has up to 64 or even higher input and output in the same antenna, which requires a high set of antennas As a result, the antenna design becomes more and more complex. From this, we can get the materials with low permittivity and tolerance, lower insertion loss and higher consistency, which can be used in the design and processing of multi-layer boards, keep stable performance in temperature and environmental changes, and meet the requirements of flame retardancy. "
At the same time, she stressed that in the millimeter wave band, 5g band also includes 28ghz, 39ghz and other millimeter wave bands, and the signals in the millimeter wave band have very small wavelengths, so the circuit design needs to choose thinner circuit materials. And with the increase of frequency, the circuit loss will further increase, and the circuit materials with lower loss are also needed to meet the design requirements.
"In addition, due to the multi-channel characteristics of 5g system, it is necessary to reduce the size of the circuit and the volume of the base station. Engineers put forward higher requirements for the integration of radio frequency and digital signals, so it is necessary to widely use multi-layer board structure for circuit design, and the number of circuit layers will evolve from 10 to 20 or even 30." Phoebe Gao.
In addition to the high-frequency and high-speed CCL to meet the needs of 5g data transmission and faster computing speed and higher power, the future development of copper clad laminate technology will also present a "green ring"