Chiplet, this type of product became popular

Zhang Yuansong, an analyst at ITRI's IEK International Institute of Obstetrics and Technology, said that although the strength of the PCB industry's peak season in the third quarter remains to be seen, as consumer products continue to be destocked, the momentum of EV, AI servers, and satellite communications will continue, and they are optimistic about the PCB output value today. It is expected to slow down first and then jump next year, and will return to growth in 2024; ABF carrier boards will benefit from the proliferation of advanced packaging fields, and the shortage of supply next year and the year after will expand for the second consecutive year.

Zhang Yuansong attended the IEK expert forum held by Yushan Securities on the 28th and believed that automobiles will be the only PCB terminal application expected to increase year-on-year this year. In particular, electric vehicles account for 14% to 15% of the total automobiles. EVs will drive the usage and area of ​​PCBs. If If we can break into the electric vehicle supply chains of Tesla, BYD and others, we will be able to take orders in the next one to two years.

Although multilayer boards accounted for 60% of the total automotive PCB output value in the first half of this year, the increasing popularity of automotive electronics and ADAS will promote the application of HDI in automotive radars and automotive lens modules. HDI and soft boards have become Automotive is the segment with the greatest growth potential.

In terms of short-term prosperity, Zhang Yuansong believes that the purchase of new Apple devices in the third quarter is expected to have a peak season effect. However, with high inflation and mainland China's recovery not as good as expected, the intensity of the peak season remains to be seen.

The high growth of the PCB industry in 2022 has created a higher comparison base period. Therefore, the overall PCB output value will decline by 16.8% in 2023, falling to NT$769.3 billion. In 2024, it will benefit from the simultaneous recovery of mobile phones, laptops, and semiconductors, coupled with the addition of EVs. , AI servers, and satellite communications will continue this year’s momentum. The overall PCB output value will return to growth, and is expected to increase by 8.1% annually.

Especially for the ABF carrier board, in order to meet the needs of high-end computing, chiplet heterogeneous integrated packaging technology is the future trend. Chips from different FABs, different process nodes and different attributes can be integrated into one chip. This will drive The number of layers, area, and circuit density of ABF carrier boards have raised the manufacturing threshold. The high-end semiconductor process drives the demand for ABF carrier boards. As advanced packaging spreads to various fields, ABF carrier boards will exceed supply by 5% this year. In 2024, In 2025, supply will exceed demand, and the supply gap will reach 5% or 8%.

Regarding AI servers, Zhang Yuansong's AI server share is still low, but based on the hardware analysis of the mainstream model NVIDIA DGX A100, the GPU module is the core component, accounting for 80% of the overall PCB cost, including 8 GPU chips and 6 NV Switches. The chips are all packaged in ABF carrier boards, 8 GPU accelerator cards are made with high-end HDI (high-density interconnect board), and 1 GPU mainboard is made with HLC (high-level board).

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