Stop Playing Catch-up. Time to take the Initiative. Leading PCB manufacturers, which were hit hard by the unprecedented lack of demand last year, are turning aggressive to take an upper hand in the global competition, seeking to develop next-generation technologies ahead of others.
The nation`s major PCB vendors have decided to heavily invest in future-oriented technologies, instead of following in the footsteps of the U.S. and Japan as they used to, realizing that they need to be in the vanguard of global leaders to survive in the era of cold-blood competition.
In particular, they feel threatened by their Chinese counterparts who continue to close the gap and move towards the global market, propelled by China`s entry into WTO.
Samsung Electro_Mechanics will concentrate its efforts on flip-chip board business this year as it sees the established multi-layer board (MLB) and BGA board posing limits to taking the top global spot.
The flip-chip board is a PCB designed to fit in next-generation microprocessors and its development is at a very early stage of sample production even in advanced countries. The flip-chip board market is expected to be in full bloom by 2004.
Daeduck Electronics, which has had hard times amid the contraction of large MLB market for communications systems, is set to heavily invest in early commercialization of via-to-via buildup engineering. The via-to-via engineering is an advanced PCB manufacturing model that creates a couple of buildup boards, instead of applying the buildup technology only to the top layer of MLBs.
In particular, as applications of the upgraded technology are expected to include virtually all of mobile phone systems throughout the third- and fourth-generation mobile telecoms era, PCB makers in advanced countries are also racing to develop the new technology.
Simtech, also battered by the chip market recession of worst kind, is poised to break through the current stalemate with diversification strategy. The company is focusing on embedded PCB, a future profitable model. The embedded PCB, which transforms resistance and condensers on PCB surface into circuits to process within PCB, is expected to emerge as the hottest issue in the industry.
Daeduck GDS is taking its bet on PCBs for digital home appliances such as PDP and DVD. "The digital home appliance market is in its fledging stage," said an official from the company.
"As demand for digital home appliances are expected to explosively rise at the time of World Cup finals, we are concentrating our efforts on building globally competitive lines," he added.