Why copper still rules the motherboard trace

https://psyll.com/articles/technology/why-copper-still-rules-the-motherboard-trace

7•lucasfletcher•5d ago

Comments

da-x•5d ago

Copper from electronics is recyclable, so I'm guessing we should see more recycling of electronics if there are any mining difficulties.

AngryData•49m ago

I think its unlikely we will ever run into any real copper shortages longterm. It is a pretty common metal across the world and if costs start to rise there are tons of copper mining areas sitting around waiting for the economics of mining to be profitable.

myrmidon•25m ago

Copper price is up ~500% since 2000 btw, this is already downregulating its use.

Not sure what your benchmark for shortage is, but if we had similar price development with fuel people would've gone ballistic.

It's quite possible that this will further escalate over the next decades, because demand is continuously rising and mining/recycling is not keeping up with it.

phendrenad2•38m ago

Copper will remain relevant for some things, but the very high-end will probably start using SiP-to-SiP fiber, and the low-end (consumer devices) have everything bunched so close together you have to ask "what trace?"

blendergeek•33m ago

This is a tedious read that is mostly tangents from the headline. The question of “why copper?” is mostly about why not aluminum, silver, or gold. The article touches on aluminum but never bothers to answer why not silver/gold.

This article has no central thesis and is instead a mishmash of random facts about electricity flow through circuit boards (often weirdly specific at that). Don't read this article hoping to find an answer to the question posed in the headline

cyberax•21m ago

Gold is not great for bulk traces, it has worse conductivity (thermal and electric) than copper. It's used for coatings because of its corrosion resistance and its incredible ductility.

Silver would be better than copper, but the difference is not large (~8%) enough to justify the price differential.

21asdffdsa12•31m ago

Copper is not self sealing and thus destroys the electronics when breached by humidity? Makes it ideal.

Fordec•31m ago

Money. Whether it's material cost, technological complexity or lower efficiency reasons, regardless, the reason is money.

amelius•26m ago

Next: OpenAI buys all the copper mines.

Skwid•19m ago

You can tell it's going to be a quality site when the article begins with a selection of PHP warnings. One link gave me a 410 which was a surprise, until I realised it returns 410 instead of 404 for every missing page.

Please don't invest any time in these articles, the whole site is a bizarre AI generated marketing scam

consp•8m ago

The images scream cheap cow manure product comparison "our product is better than lousy competition". And it reads like a bloated LLM digest.

crest•6m ago

Because those lazy chemists have stopped finding new elements to use instead. /s

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Comments

7.1 Earthquake in Japan

Our position on open-weights models

A $500 RL fine-tune of a 9B open model beat frontier models on catalog review

Ars Astronomica – English translations of rare Hebrew and Latin astronomy texts

Benchmarking Opus 5 on SlopCodeBench

Neutrino-1 8B

Vehicle Motion Cues

Using an open model feels surprisingly good

RTX 2080 Ti Memory Upgrade to 22 GB

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Watching Go's new garbage collector move through the heap

Kimi K3 Now Available via Telnyx Inference API

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Why copper still rules the motherboard trace

Show HN: Yap – OSS on-device voice dictation for macOS with no model to download

TWC Classics

C/C++ projects packaged for Zig

Launch HN: Rise Reforming (YC S26) – Turning Waste Gases into Valuable Chemicals

Ray tracing massive amounts of animated geometry using tetrahedral cages

The age of token efficiency, the age of libraries

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