PCB market to reach $50 billion, says researcher

LONDON — The market for printed circuit boards (PCBs) will be $50 billion in 2007 and rise to more than $76 billion in 2012, according to Visant Strategies a New York based market research company.

The Asia-Pacific region is expected to expand PCB production such that PCB revenues for the region will increase by over 60 percent from 2007 to 2012 with commensurate falls in other regions. Other regions may continue to act centers of excellence for lower volume specialist forms of PCB.

"Challenges are inherent to designing and manufacturing even more miniature and complex boards and meeting the escalating demands from the increasing number of pins in a chip, the growth in high speed serial data streaming technologies, and the use of bused interfaces and clock rates higher than 400-MHz, among other particulars," said Kaustubha Parkhi, an author of reports with Visant.

PCBs come in a variety of forms including high density interconnect and microvia PCBs, for single, double and multi-layer PCBs, rigid and flexible PCBs, and PCBs using substrates such as alumina, FR4, and beryllium oxide.