BANNOCKBURN, IL — Nearly half the world's PCB manufacturers for computer and telecommunications applications expect their highest clock speeds to exceed 25GHz by 2019, a new study contends.

Meanwhile, fabricators for military and aerospace end-markets says heat dissipation is a "design-limiting factor" in half of their devices currently, a percentage that is expected to rise in the next four years.

These are among the findings of PCB Technology Trends 2014, IPC's global biennial study of circuit board fabrication. The survey-based study shows how PCB manufacturers are meeting today’s technology demands and looks at the changes expected by 2019 that will affect PCB fabricators and their suppliers of materials and equipment.

Based on data collected from 158 companies worldwide, the 173-page PCB technology trends study presents the aggregate data segmented by application for five key segments: computers and telecommunications, consumer electronics, industrial and automotive electronics, medical electronics, and military and aerospace electronics.

Other findings include more than one-third of responding companies in the military and aerospace segment are currently embedding passive components in their boards. Embedding of passive and active components is expected to increase substantially by 2019 for all five applications studied.

The study, which is available now from IPC, covers such issues as: clock speed, heat dissipation, operation cycles, product life expectancy, environmental operating range, lamination cycles, board thickness, layer counts, line width and spacing, via diameters, aspect ratios, use of embedded technologies, surface-mount land dimensions, I/O pitch, test density, recyclable content, component size, and numbers of leads, solder joints and components per board area.

Interested in embedding components or high-speed designs? Check out PCB West this September at the Santa Clara (CA) Convention Center.

• Prev
• Next