Supercomputing and radar new materials “underpin” 5G not only make the internet faster

Before long, everyone will become 5G people.
If you can buy and choose a 5G mobile phone, you can only count it as “Muggle”. How can you really enter the 5G world and become a 5G person? Recently, the 2019 PCB Industrial Ecological Development Conference hosted by Founder PCB under Founder Technology with the theme of 5G was held. Industry experts from the fields of communication equipment terminals, circuit board raw materials, circuit board manufacturing and other fields, as well as experts and scholars from internationally renowned research institutions and scientific research institutions, discussed the 5G industry from many angles. They believed that 5G was far more than making mobile phones faster online.
New materials on supercomputers and radars “lay the groundwork” for 5G base stations
The first thing to popularize 5G is to establish a base station capable of transmitting 5G signals.
In the 5G era when 3.5G and above frequency bands are used to transmit signals, the networking mode of “macro base station as the main and micro base station as the auxiliary” is mainly adopted. This formation mode is similar to aircraft carrier formation, and the micro base station is an effective extension of the macro base station signal.
“The circuit board material of Hongji Station is quite special and one of the difficulties in the realization of 5G.” Liu Shufeng, chairman of Guangdong Shengyi Technology Co., Ltd., explained that the amount of signal transmitted by 5G is 10-100 times that of 4G. The material is not only a simple requirement for improving the speed of signal transmission, but also includes less loss, no packet loss, stability and high reliability of signal transmission.
This is the high speed, multi-connection, low delay and high reliability of 5G communication, which is often said by the communication industry. These requirements are put forward for the whole 5G industry chain, but the most basic raw materials of circuit boards must be the first to bear the brunt. “When we talk about low time delay, we are talking about the responsiveness of circuit board materials to signal transmission,” Liu Shufeng said.
The surface of the 5G base station may not change, but there are qualitative changes in it. “The epoxy materials in the 4G era will be replaced by polyphenylene ether in the 5G era, and polyphenylene ether is now used in supercomputers because it can guarantee large signal volume and fast transmission,” Liu Shufeng said.
Another material that will be widely used in 5G base stations is polytetrafluoroethylene. High-quality polytetrafluoroethylene has previously been used in circuit board products related to radar. The signal transmission speed using PTFE as the base material is 40% faster than the traditional base material, and the loss is smaller.
Whether it comes from supercomputers or radar, the new material “turn around” 5G means a new topic.
Printed circuit, creating “high-speed road network” in the micron world
In reality, the number of passengers received and sent by high-speed railway has multiplied, so it is necessary to build a larger high-speed railway station and a high-speed railway line with more parallel tracks.
In the electronic world, the traffic of communication signals pouring into mobile phones has soared. Why hasn’t 5G mobile phones become bigger and thicker?
Because in the micron world, engineers have built more highways for the distribution and transmission of electronic signals, and even designed highway and railway composite channels compatible with highways and high-speed railways.
“The signal is transmitted in the conductor, while the conductive layer on the printed circuit board where the signal is transmitted is only a few tens of microns. In order to make the transmission rate increase by 10 to 100 times, the signal flow is not congested, not crashed, and the transmission is stable, we must make full use of small space.” said Sun Rui, president of Founder PCB Research Institute.
The area of the main board of the 5G mobile phone has been reduced to about half the size of a business card, but the number of signal transmission lines has been increased to more than 1800, and the requirements for transmission speed, stability and reliability have been greatly improved. “The manufacturing process of the circuit board signal line is a high-precision process. The deviation of the signal line that was allowed to be tens of microns will be compressed to tens of microns or even several microns.” Sun Rui explained that this will pose more challenges to the specific circuit board manufacturing process.
Printed circuit boards are known as the mother of electronic products. It is reported that in the 5G era, the number of components integrated into the printed circuit board will increase significantly. Driven by 5G, more and more electronic products enterprises are starting the “old and new” mode to catch up with the 5G tide.