ABF carrier board shortage will resume

                 According to a report by the Taiwan Business Times, Zhang Yuan, an analyst at the IEK Obstetrics International Institute of the Institute of Industry and Technology, said that although the intensity of the third quarter peak season in the PCB industry remains to be observed, as consumer products continue to destock, EV, AI, and satellite communication continue to have momentum. It is optimistic that PCB output value is expected to decline first and then jump next year, and will return to growth in 2024. ABF carrier boards benefit from the diffusion of advanced packaging fields, and next year The shortage of supply in the following year will continue to expand for two consecutive years.

                On August 28th, Zhang Yuan attended an IEK expert symposium held by Yushan Securities, believing that automobiles will be the only PCB terminal application expected to increase annually this year, with electric vehicles accounting for 14% to 15% of the total automotive weight. EV drives the use and area of PCBs, and if it can enter the supply chain of electric vehicles such as Tesla and BYD, it will be interested in taking orders in the next year to two years.

                Although multi-layer boards accounted for 60% of the overall output value of automotive PCBs in the first half of this year, with the trend of automotive electronics and ADAS popularization, the application of HDI in automotive radar and lens modules will be promoted. HDI and soft boards will become the most promising blocks for automotive growth, and HDI supply chains such as Jianding, Yaohua, Dingying, and Jingpeng are expected to benefit.

                In terms of short-term prosperity, Zhang Yuanhuo believes that the third quarter of the Apple new device sales boom is expected to have a peak season effect. However, with high inflation and mainland recovery not as expected, the intensity of the peak season remains to be observed.

                 The high growth of the PCB industry in 2022 has created a relatively high base period, so the overall PCB output value will decline by 16.8% in 2023, dropping to NT $769.3 billion. In 2024, benefiting from the synchronous recovery of mobile phones, laptops, and semiconductors, coupled with EV, A1 servers, and satellite communication continuing this year's momentum, the overall PCB output value will return to growth, with an estimated annual increase of 8.1%.

                  Especially for the ABF carrier board part, in order to meet the needs of high-order computing, the heterogeneous integration packaging technology of small chips (Chiplets) is the future trend. It can integrate chips from different FABs, different process nodes, and different attributes into a single chip, which will drive the number of layers, area, and circuit density of ABF carrier boards, raise the manufacturing threshold, and drive the demand for ABF carrier boards in semiconductor high-order processes. With the spread of advanced packaging to various fields, The ABF carrier board will reverse from a 5% oversupply this year to a supply shortage in 2024 and 2025, with a supply gap of 5% and 8%

                  For AI servers, the proportion of Zhang Yuanchou's AI servers is still low, but based on the hardware analysis of the mainstream model NVIDIA DGX A100, the GPU module is the core component, accounting for 80% of the overall PCB cost, including 8 GPU chips and 6 NV Switch chips, all packaged in ABF carrier boards, and 8 GPU acceleration cards made in high-order HDI (high-density interconnect board); 1 GPU motherboard made of HLC (High Level Secondary Board).