PCB Currents: How They Flow, How They React

C. Coming Death of the Circuit Board

I started my career in electronics at the beginning of the PCB age. Back then, you could literally design a PCB with an X-Acto knife and do the chemistry in the kitchen sink. Ever since, we have been predicting the end of the PCB because of the increasing densities of ICs. The most recent prediction of the death of the PCB relates to the high degree of integration in Apple’s various iPod and iPad designs.

The first predictions of the death of PCBs started with MSI (medium-scale integration) in the early 1960s, followed by LSI (large-scale integration) in the late 1960s. Then there was VLSI, then microprocessors, then ULSI, then MCMs, then SOCs, and so on and so on. Each time, the demise of the printed circuit ...