At the end of last year, Apple's new mobile phone was not having successful or satisfactory sales, forcing Apple to cut down its financial forecast for the first quarter of this year. As for the PCB manufacturers that put SLP into production the previous year, they have gradually regained the attention of Chinese mobile phone factories, in addition to Apple’s demand. Therefore, these manufacturers have again started to incorporate SLP into design, while related manufacturers are also gradually gaining confidence in the prospect of product development.
             Large-sized PCB manufacturers are optimistic that the market development of substrate-like PCB applications on hand-held device products is expected to follow the development of high-density link boards (HDI) to any layer (HDI Anylayer) process. Within two years’ time, it will accelerate its diffused application, and the production capacity of substrate-like PCB will not be able to be of a single incompatible process. Currently, when the notion of end users being taken into design is just about to burgeon, each of the manufacturers still relies on the HDI Anylayer process as its mainstream process.
             In the market downturn, manufacturers of non-Apple mobile phones have boldly incorporated the design of high-priced mobile-phone SLP and are looking forward to these products being shipped in the first half of this year, which would help the difficult situations of the slack season of PCB manufacturers in the first half of the year. Furthermore, they have mainly focused on the design of a high-profile flagship model so that they can catch up and surpass the current product advantages of the iPhone.     
             In 2017, the motherboard design of Apple's new iPhone 8, iPhone 8 + and iPhone X used substrate-like PCB (SLP) design, with 2017 considered the pioneering year of SLP in the PCB industry. Those Taiwanese manufacturers that have invested in the development of SLP and are certified by Apple include Compeq, Zeng Ding, and Unimicron, among others.
             The advantages of a substrate-like PCB design are its reduction in size and area, freeing up more space to accommodate a larger capacity for batteries and higher-speed computing for such features as AI, 3D photography, 3D sensing, etc.
             At present, the biggest shortcomings of substrate-like PCB are that the market size is not large enough and production yield is not high enough, so that its unit price is obviously several times higher than that of HDI Anylayer. However, regarding the production of substrate-like PCB, its manufacturers are waiting for the market to expand, so that the price can be lowered to attract many more mobile phone factories to incorporate it into their design. (News source: cnYes)