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July 2014 • The PCB Magazine 19 DEvICE EMBEDDING IN PCBS: EvOLUTION OR REvOLUTION? continues have been given to the PCB fabricator industry in Europe, necessary to overcome the issue of a single source supply chain. At the end of the '90s, the PCB industry was anticipating a growing business from this newly-developed SIMOVE [3] technology. So it was a big surprise that this in- vestment did not result in additional business; indeed it was quite the opposite. At the moment the SIMOVE technology was ready for industrial- isation, it was no longer needed. The reason was that the integration on silicon was so much ad- vanced in functionality and cost-reduction that the embedding design—using PCB technology— did not offer any packaging or cost benefits. The questions that need to be answered are: • Is there a market for embedded devices in PCBs in Europe or in the market worldwide? • Under what circumstances could the PCB fabricator benefit from these markets or market niches? To answer these questions we must look at the changes in the market and in the demand by key OEMs and industry segments. Semiconductors Drive Electronic Design In the electronics business it is important to understand that the semiconductor suppliers are much larger than PCB suppliers. The top 25 semiconductor fabricators (Figure 2) have a turn- over of about 4 times the total global PCB market with more than 1500 fabricators worldwide. As can be seen, the semiconductor market is no longer a fast growing market. The semi- conductor industry is looking into opportuni- ties in forward integration in packaging, like SiP (system in package) or even in SiPCB (system in printed circuit boards). When the quantities are large, the design on silicon is one option to expand the business. An additional example was experienced at the beginning of the smartphone era. Flip phones with many PCBs and flex rigid board combinations with integrated key boards were acclaimed as the solution for the future. Opti- misation technologies with special rigid-flex PCB designs offered an excellent technical solu- tion and generated more business for the PCB industry. At this point, the semiconductor fabricators recognised the quantities needed in future for Figure 2: the top global 25 semiconductor leaders represent 4x the total global production of PcBs [4] .