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How Motherboards Are Made
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Jun 16, 2007 09:10 AM
from the behind-the-scenes dept.
from the behind-the-scenes dept.
mikemuch writes "Reporter Mark Hachman recently took a tour of a motherboard manufacturing facility operated by Gigabyte in Taiwan, and has posted a complete slideshow of the process. He was surprised by how much still had to be done by hand, but the company is still able to produce 1.5 million motherboards a month."
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Sad truth... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Sad truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
A better example than motherboards is clothing. Take T-shirts for example. The textiles industry was historically the first to become industrialized, yet here we are 250+ years later, and there are still people in sweatshops making the simplest items of clothing. Why? Because it's technically too difficult to automate clothing manufacture? Whatever.
The reality is that no motherboard, clothing, or any other company is willing to actually spend money and innovate. Find ways of making basic items by the millions, quickly, reliably, cheaply. And the reason they're not willing to do it is because they can still find cheaper and cheaper sources of labour. On China, they're current strategy when wages on the east coast get too expensive, is just to move 100km inland, rinse and repeat.
There is lack of innovation in the manufacturing sector. It's caused an oversupply of cheap labour. Simply put, there is no pressure on factory owners to continue the industrial revolution, and human progress. Instead there's an incentive to use quasi, and what the hell, full blown slave labour [bbc.co.uk].
I harp on China, but it's happening all over. It's happening a lot closer to home than you think [bbc.co.uk]. Our society is back-peddling, and it's down to the fact that rabid (no so)free market capitalism has become the dominant ethos of our politics and media, where it is assumed that no matter what the issue problem or injustice is, the omnipresent "market" will find a solution to all our ills.
I'm not some fanatical anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism protester. I just think that too much power, not money, power, is being concentrated into the hands of private companies. I don't like big government either, but I still think that corporations should be reigned in. If we don't, your children or grandchildren could find themselves like those Chinese brickworkers, force to work at the barrel of a privately owned gun.
P.S.
I believe in a free and fair market. Why should workers here have to compete against countries with lower standards?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's discouraging. I've watched America go from robotic car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
The assembly line for the Macintosh IIci was more automated than this one. Back in the 1980s, when consumer electronics came from Japan, the Japanese makers were frantically trying to automated enough to keep their labor costs down. Seiko and Sony developed some beautiful technologies for making small consumer electronics items untouched by human hands.
Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
>> Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
First,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sad truth... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Sad truth... (Score:5, Insightful)
You make it sound as though you found yourself at a breakfast table, croissant in one hand, Le Monde in another, with a stunned expression on your face having just learned that all the cheap clothing and shoes and furniture and electronics that we in the first-world just LOVE were manufactured by a bevy of tiny little hands in sweatshops.
I'm sorry, but wasn't that entirely obvious? Hasn't this issue been on the tip of our humanitarian tongues for at least twenty years? And when you went on to say "One has to wonder what conditions exist in factories where people don't get guided tours" all I could think is "NO! One does NOT have to wonder" because one should already KNOW.
These conditions are deplorable.
But the GP said that it's "sad" that human labor like this is cheaper than machinery. Well, perhaps, but I disagree slightly. Until we put all those people to work, until we bring them into the global economy, their situations will never improve. Only after we hire these people will we begin to see upward pressure on wages. Only after this generation--and perhaps the next--work painstaking hours to produce our shiny toys will you begin to see what more closely resembles a living wage in these countries.
My then-girlfriend did her Graduate thesis in Ecomonics on this 2 years ago and her research led her to believe that in 25 years you'll see the average Chinese worker making $2/hr in 2005 dollars. That would be a stunning change in the world economy, in terms of both cost-of-production and consumer markets.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
The result is a baby ATX.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Insightful)
Also there was much more detail on the ATE and soak testing.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> that made sense, and did justice to the hard work and conditions those people work in.
So true. If I was forced by ci
Cheaper by hand (Score:5, Informative)
A few years ago I worked on a project at ABB Robotics (largest maker of industrial robots) and had the chance to often see their production lines. Once upon a time their assembly lines were automated to a large degree, until they realized that their throughput wasn't big enough to benefit from robots doing the work. People were cheaper and needed less maintenance. When you built a new robot model, you could use the same people - with little extra education required. Robots on the other hand required expensive reprogramming and testing for each small change.
When I was there they were just dismantling the last robot in the line - the one that painted new robots. Instead they outsourced it and now three guys in gas masks spray paint them manually.
Smarter automation (Score:3, Informative)
Painting robots are getting smarter. I've seen some R&D work where a LIDAR scanner looks at the thing to be painted, the software builds a 3D model, a painting plan is generated, and a robot paints the thing, moving around to get all the surfaces and
The unknown steps (Score:5, Informative)
I think the first step where the author did not know what happened showed a machine for applying the glue for the surface mounted devices on the pcb. This step comes before the smd's are actually placed on the board. The glue keeps the components in place until they are soldered. I believe the glue is removed afterward, but I'm not sure.
The second 'interesting looking' thing looked like a device for transferring BIOS-IC's from plastic, tube-like containers to tape-rolls for the pick-and-place machines.
Not much of an article... (Score:5, Informative)
When the author says "To be honest, I'm not sure what this machine does", from what I can see of the tiny photo, he's looking at a machine which stencils solder paste onto the exposed pads of the PCB.
When he says "The adhesive needs to be hardened, so the components won't fall off" he means the solder paste is melted then allowed to cool with the components in it, thereby attaching the components to the PCB electrically and mechanically.
When he says "BIOS Taping Area, I'm not quite sure what went on here" I would guess they are writing the BIOS code into the flash memory.
As he doesn't really explain, the reason people are putting connectors on the board manually even after the automated component placement stage is because the plastic connectors would melt in the heat of the oven, before the solder melted. So there are two processes: first the small, high tech chips are put on and soldered in the oven, then people manually insert the funny-shaped easy to melt parts, and they are soldered separately.
And now you know!
Heresy!!!!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Last picture (Score:4, Interesting)
Got to love this image (Score:5, Funny)
1. Be more responsible
2. Complain less
3. Be more attentive
4. Make lesser mistakes
Manufacturing. (Score:5, Interesting)
And in my experience they are very industrious workers. I've heard surveys quotes that Americans are among the most productive works in the World. They work hard, but honestly, I don't believe it. Either other nations don't bother doing adequate surveys or American companies inflate productivity. I did also hear another survey that said American workers were complainers, the French and British are worse. I believe that too. Taiwanese are much like the Japanese. There's a job to be done, they get in there and do it. And they do it quickly. They have an excellent work ethic, and take any job they do seriously. It's why you can walk into a Starbucks or McDonalds in Taiwan and the place is spotless and service excellent.
It also helps that managers at technology companies there tend to have engineering backgrounds. Unlike American companies where we get stuck with business and marketing idiots making important decisions. I can't count the times I've had to deal with guys here who don't know what they're talking about and end up making fools of themselves in meetings. Even worse, they don't care to learn because they think it's all beneath them. So they end up managing based on emotion, almost like children.
Not that there aren't problems there. I think Taiwanese in general are underpaid. And there's this ideal there too many people have that once you're in management you basically get to screw around all day. Some managers, especially in office environments, can get verbally abusive with employees. It's the sort of thing that no way in hell would ever fly in the US.
Anyway, I had the opportunity while working there to visit a few companies, and I got to see some cool stuff. Like I said, it's mostly manual labor. I was disappointed when I first saw that; I was hoping to see these giant robotic arms swinging around, going about their business. But it's not the case. It would just be too expensive to purchase and then set up this equipment. And then having to retool for other products would be another hassle.
I also did some work for a company that sold and installed semi-conductor manufacturing equipment. That was one business where companies didn't want employees directly handling the product. So business was good for this company.
Taiwan has two of the largest contract semi-conductor foundries in the world. Now that was impressive. The company I visited a few years ago had just recently completed this new facility in southern Taiwan. This was when companies were first starting to move over to 300mm wafers. So they installed this transport in the ceiling to transport these wafers around from machine to machine. The wafers are carried in this case which is something like 1.5ft all around. It has handles so it could be carried. And people did used to carry them around. But given that a case full of at least 10 wafers can be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars they decided they didn't want to risk having people drop these. Hence the transport system. In fact, the facility had relatively few people there, most were responsible for ensuring everything was running properly or setting up new equipment. All in all, it was impressive.