How will the boards be in the future?
The chips have gone through a tremendous evolution. Intel's processor
clocks nearly 4 Gbit/s now, but Sony/Toshiba's playstation processor can
make 200 billion 'calculations' per sekund. That's not the end. The UK
company Clear Speed (I think they call themselves that) are
experimenting with chips with
Several hundred processor cores. They claim that in one or two years
from now, their processor will be capable of about 1,000 Gbit/s! But
what about
chip capacitors and copper lines and vias and all other components on a
board? Ceramic capacitors have indeed become smaller and with a lot more
pF in them. A 100 nF cap today is several times less in size than it was
some 10 year back. And you can see tiny uH chips, LED chips, 6 A fuses
just some square millimeters wide. But vias and PTHs and conductors and
multilayer structures have not by far undergone same revolution. And
we should not even talk about Moore's law. Question is: is there a
demand for further minimizing these components? Or will the familiar
PWB as we see it today be  superseded by silicon (just an exampel, there
are dozens of other materials) substrates with integration of LCR in one
and the same process? Will a 100 Watt DC power supply be a 1x1 cm
'board'
and a computer board less than your playcard? Will the enormous assembly
plants be just small units with 100 persons, supercomputers, and
automatic
machines that produce electronics for a whole country on just a few
hundred
meters? What will happen if, over a night, there is a change from
copper/
epoxy/drilling/plating/soldering/boards to substrates with built-in
nanotubes, optic conductors and all other future stuff, and no need any
more for the ordinary, now 50 year old PWB? Will this happen and when?
We have been discussing this over a cup of tea or coffee (not american
coffee) but it always ends in a shrug and 'well, well, that day, that
headache'. Just wondering if anyone plans for the DAY, or if we all
just put the head in the..the..waste bin.

If we plan to conquer other planets and build civilisation there, logic
gives that we must have and will see quite a new generation of
'boards'..

Ingemar Hernefjord
Ericsson Microwave Systems

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