PCB Tech - Future star-automotive electronics PCB circuit board

In October last year, Tesla issued a statement that all Tesla cars currently in production at the factory will be equipped with hardware capable of full self-driving capability. Including 8 cameras around the body, 12 latest ultrasonic sensors, an enhanced forward millimeter-wave radar, and the on-board computing device NVIDIA’s Drive PX2, which has a processing power that will be 40 times higher than the previous generation.

With the rapid development of new energy vehicles and unmanned driving, the degree of automotive electronics has deepened. According to Prismark statistics, in 2009, the output value of automotive PCB products accounted for 3.7% of the overall PCB output value. By 2017, the proportion has increased significantly to 8.8%, which is estimated to reach 5.2 billion US dollars;

In the trend of automotive electronics, smart cars and new energy vehicles will be the main development directions in the future. Smart cars are mainly driverless. The core technology is the ADAS advanced auxiliary safe driving system. The components used on the PCB include sensors, controllers, and safety systems. The sensors used by ADAS mainly use millimeter radar waves, the frequencies are concentrated in 24GHz and 77GHz, which have high requirements on PCB boards and processes, and mainly use high-frequency PCBs. New energy vehicles include vehicle controllers, motor controllers and battery management systems (BMS), and BMS is the place where PCBs are used the most.

According to Gao Gong's data, each new energy vehicle uses a PCB area of 2.5 square meters, accounting for 10% of the cost of the BMS. Therefore, the vigorous development of new energy vehicles has brought huge market demand for PCBs. Driven by the explosion of downstream industries, automotive PCBs are expected to become the fastest growing field in PCB subdivision applications in the next five years. Japanese and Taiwan PCB board manufacturers have invested heavily in this field.

Looking up at the starry sky, you have to keep your feet on the ground.

At present, the most used automotive electronics are still audio, navigation, ETC and other functions, and the requirements for high-end PCB boards are not high. The most used are 4-layer and 6-layer boards. The conditions are not high and the market scale is large. Naturally, many companies favor them. This year, the bright prospects of the PCB industry have ushered in the prosperity of the entire industry. To be honest, my country's PCB industry is still in its infancy, and companies started late, and performance growth has been in the past two years. Most companies are not strong in R&D technology, and even many companies are only satisfied with being "processing factories" and are not enterprising at all. However, there are also individual companies that are full of ambitions and persistently invest money in research and development, and through continuous adjustment of the relationship between capital, technology, and management, in an attempt to find the best state of corporate growth in this great era. With the deepening of the industrial process, there will be divisions between companies, good companies are flourishing, and bad companies are dying.

Survival of the fittest, big fish eat small fish, industry concentration will gradually increase, this is a historical inevitability.