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Additive Reality: Isolated Raindrops Announce the Storm

It is an early January evening after office hours. Despite my best New Year’s intentions of striking a good balance between work and personal life, when I hear the ding of an incoming email, I decide to check it anyway. It’s a message from the U.S., where Don Monn of Taiyo has just given his view on the inkjet market.

Something he says immediately strikes a chord, “What I can tell you is … there are well over 20 installations … between North America and Europe. There are another five or six already committed to be installed in the first quarter of 2022.”

I do my best to keep track of sales in the inkjet market and Monn’s numbers don’t add up for me; other equipment manufacturers must have sold some machines and we missed them in our count. The missing ones were not documented by press releases or similar announcements. Thanks to the help of a few colleagues and my professional network, the accounting of tools reached the 20 installations.

Since 2017, every six months (more or less) a press release reports a tool being installed (Figure 1). Rumors of other installations tell us that this number is at least twice as high. Combining what we know with what is rumored comes out to one tool per quarter, so hearing Monn say that five or six installations will be completed within one quarter represents a sudden increase. The “drizzle” of the past years now has a different look; it’s a tipping point. Previously isolated raindrops have announced a storm. Luckily for us, this “climate change” will bring along environmentally friendly manufacturing.

Figure 1: Acquisition rate according to the most recent information.

Why Now?
Capital equipment business deals are a long sales process, taking months or even years. It requires a perfect match between equipment strength and (future) opportunities of the market. Knowing about future market development helps present a view of available opportunities. A market analysis from an expert can give direction; multiple market analyses offer insight on the possible variability of forecast. The global PCB market revenue of the last 10 years helps us determine whether this assumption is reasonable. In Figure 2, I collected multiple sources. The WECC (World Electronic Circuits Council) and the Data4CB (Michael Gasch’s reports) are good references for assessing the size of the market (past and present), though these do not give forecasts. We can use other sources to provide that crystal ball view, many of which foresee growth for several years to come. However, a reality check is built into the graph: the set of measured and forecast data collected by Statista few years back clearly shows the difficulty of forecasts. Basically, steep sudden increases are not likely to repeat year after year.

Figure 2: Collection of market information. Data from WECC and Data4PCB (pronounced colors) comes from their respective commercial reports. Data from other sources (faint colors; the graph legend states the names) is freely available online at the date of publishing as general description of a commercially available report with a greater level of detail. Lines are a loose spline fit meant as a guide to the eye.

While trying to make sense of all the dots in the graph, I estimate that the global revenue in coming years will stay about the same level, around 74G$, give or take 5G$. This means that the industry will have to increase its margin since revenue is unchanging. There are several strategies to achieve that. The obvious one would be to improve the relative cost position, but a smarter one would be to strive to deliver additional nonprice value¹. Additive manufacturing, with its material saving and improved thickness control, can offer both. Furthermore, additional nonprice value might come in handy for the upcoming wave of electric vehicles and ubiquitous renewable energy. It might still take some time to show up (Figure 1), but for technical reasons listed below there is a perfect match to a sustainable and future-oriented strategy with inkjet printing.

To illustrate this match, future columns will address:

• A more robust solution for high voltage breakdown by thickness control as well as by a better degree of polymerization due to the layered curing. This will be beneficial for inverter and switches needed for the wave of renewable energy sources.
• The possibility to tune the insulator thickness around transmission lines that carry high frequency signal. This will be useful to miniaturize current technologies like 5G and to prepare for the next generations.
• The flexibility of securing the correct solder masking on thick copper (even few hundreds of micrometer).
• The higher adhesion to ever-finer microetched surfaces thanks to the more convenient wetting behavior of the surface.
• Product reliability benefit. The absence of post-treatment residues thanks to the dome-shaped cross section of inkjet features. This characteristic shape has what is called a “positive foot.”
• Now that the big “why” of an increased interest in additive manufacturing is clear, my upcoming columns will clarify the what and how.

In the meantime, I’ll review my New Year’s resolutions.

References

1. “What is strategy?” by M.E.A.O. Porter, Harvard Business School Press Boston, pp. 61-78, November-December 1996.

 Luca Gautero is product manager at SUSS MicroTec (Netherlands) B.V.