Why copper still rules the motherboard trace | Hacker News Reader

Why copper still rules the motherboard trace

psyll.com

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

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.

For those of us who appreciate PCBs as works of art, it never occurred to me that I could make a silver plated board just as a flex.

You totally can! But it'll just look like it's made out of aluminum :(

I think that in addition to the cost you would also have a corrosion problem. That's usually the reason that silver isn't used as an engineering material.

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

Correct. Copper is relatively cheap, abundant an very easy to work with.

Gold is very easy to work with, but extremely expensive. I think if gold was as cheap and abundant as copper, it would be the go to metal due to corrosion problems other metals have.

Silver is also expensive and I think harder to work with then copper.

Aluminum, I would think it is harder to work with, but seems the article talks a lot about aluminum.

Harder to work with equates to costing more $ for manufacturing.

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

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

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?

Can you prove it pls?

I can't prove anything, but if you're keen here are the breadcrumbs I was was referring to:

Author Profile: https://psyll.com/elena

Author Image: https://psyll.com/assets/image/qzqgr7sazazf5o1iigkjtlbf-w84-...

The other site: https://sooryehan.org/

The full size image: https://sooryehan.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Face-1.jpeg

I notice you've submitted a few of these links, are you in some way affiliated with psyll?

Thank you very much! This is very interesting.

Yes, I have written a few articles for Psyll, mostly on politics and geopolitics.

I also became a partial owner of Psyll.com five days ago, so your post is particularly relevant to me. I will look into this matter thoroughly and investigate what happened.

Thanks again for bringing this to my attention!

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?"

When I read articles like this what I really think about is not the enormous performance of modern computers, but how wasteful the software is.

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

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.

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.

Next: OpenAI buys all the copper mines.

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

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

Need a uranium plated board, those massive atoms surely have electrons to spare

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