Why copper still rules the motherboard trace

Why copper still rules the motherboard trace(psyll.com)

6 points by lucasfletcher 5 days ago | 10 comments

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 1 hour 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.

Skwid 1 hour 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 51 minutes ago | |

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

Skwid 38 minutes ago | | |

Curiously, I reverse searched a few of the alleged author's images and did get one exact match. On that site they were an Anonymous beauty blogger in a testimonials banner. That site also had a larger version of the same image with plenty of early stable diffusion style artifacts. Curious to know the process here, is it really easier to steal someone else’s slop than make your own these days?

Fordec 1 hour ago |

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

amelius 1 hour ago |

Next: OpenAI buys all the copper mines.

21asdffdsa12 1 hour ago |

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

da-x 5 days ago |

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

AngryData 1 hour 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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?"