The Making of a Motherboard at ECS

sheiky writes "Hardcoreware.net has posted a look at the manufacturing process of a motherboard at a new ECS factory in Shen Zhen. Unlike most factories, they build boards from the ground up at one location, starting with the PCB all the way to a finished product. They also talk a little bit about the working conditions they witnessed in China."

Dupe

[Ramble]

Bit-Tech did this over a week ago.

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2006/06/16/ecs_shen_z hen_factory_tours/1.html [bit-tech.net]

What unions are getting...

[Illbay]

...is much, much smaller [64.233.187.104].

ECS at Frys

[Anonymous Coward]

I work a Fry's Electronics. The rurmor at my store is is that ECS is owned by Fry's. I have never seen or heard anything to validate or disprove that, so take it with a grain of salt.
Anywho, regardless of ownership, ECS products are the favorite things to sell at Fry's. From the ECS motherboards to their Great Quality branded computers and notebooks.

As an employee in the service department (and thus, responisble for repairing computers when they fail) I can tell you the anything made by ECS is complete dirt. The GQ computers are not too bad, but I have never seen so many DOA motherboards in my life. We had a customer buy a mobo/cpu combo last week and his board was DOA. We ended up going though SIX (yes "6") more boards before we found one that would actually work.

DO NOT BUY ECS PRODUCTS.

Re:Unions

[thelost]

hardly surprising considering the whole article reads like a paid for advertisement and actually goes into little/no detail about the manufacturing process.

Re:Unions

[wbean]

I think it's more complicated than this. Employers respond to the environment around them. They must offer pay/working conditions thar are good enough in comparison to the other alternatives to allow them to attract employees. They must NOT offer pay/working conditions that are so good that they drive up costs to the point where the firm can't function. It's hard to generalize but most employers that I know would like to be able to offer good pay and conditions. Often they simply don't feel able - I know, this isn't universally true but it's probably more true than most people believe.

The conditions in China are vastly different from the conditions here. If an employer in China - whether on his/her own or led by a union - offered Western pay/conditions they would quickly be driven out of business. They simply couldn't compete. On the other hand, the pay/conditions that are being offered are enough better than life on the farm that millions of people flock to the new jobs every year. China has a tremendous balancing act to perform. They have to keep pay down enough to create the huge number of new jobs that they need to absorb all the people leaving the farm. At the same time they have to build imfrastructure, tackle their environmental problems and raise living conditions enough to avoid unrest. Not an enviable task. I doubt that unions would be much help at this stage.

bad boards

[cdn-programmer]

bad boards - how to recognise and avoid them

http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html [redhill.net.au]

This section, however, is not about the normal variation in quality and reliability between typical motherboards. It is about plain old-fashioned greed, and the cheap, shonky boards that sometimes result from it. Here then, is a short gallery of the cheap, the nasty, and the outright fraudulent.

To quote for the Red Hill web page:

PC Chips fake cache 486

Let's begin with the most famous of them all: the fake cache 486 boards that PC Chips produced in the mid-Nineties.

---------------

From the PCCHIPS website we find: http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/AboutCOMPANY/Abou tCOMPANY.aspx?MenuID=8&LanID=2 [pcchips.com.tw]

PCCHIPS has been a leading supplier of motherboards and PC peripherals since 1994. We are committed to provide products of superior value and exemplary customer service to our customers worldwide.

http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/Legal.aspx?MenuID =8&LanID=2 [pcchips.com.tw]

The materials ("Materials") contained in this web site are provided by Elitegroup Computer Systems Co., Ltd. ("ECS") ...

I think these quotes speak for themselves.

Re:ECS at Frys

[MsGeek]

Ex-Fry's worker over here. I doubt Fry's owns ECS. They're too cheap to do something like buy out a supplier.

ECS stuff is CRAP though. Absolute fsckn crap. As well as ECS, "Great Quality" and PC Chips, stay away from anything labeled Amptron. Same company. Same "Great Quality" meaning none.

Re:Slanted?

[loraksus]

To say nothing of workplace health and safety standards. I'll put money down that 25%+ of those employees will have some kind of cancer before they turn 50 and 40% will be dead before they turn 60. Some of the chemicals used are pretty nasty shit.
The "company store / housing" thing is also popular in China - the factory mandates that you live in their dorms and eat their food - even they are overpriced (hundreds of percent) and substandard. The article claims that the housing is "included" although you can take that a couple different ways.

Re:Was this article written by the Chinese?

[Firehed]

Nah. Most Americans don't even know what Socialism is - like Communism, it's just another dirty word.

Dont worry folks, its gone

[Smoke2Joints]

Another server brought to its knees, crying. Well done slashdot!

Re:Chinese work conditions

[Hans Lehmann]

Monetary value and living expenses are also quite different in China, so there's really no comparison there..

But not for long.... From today's Los Angeles Times [latimes.com], soon workers in China will reap the benefits of our glorious HMO medical care system, thanks to companies here in the US with double-plus-good names like 'Sunnylife Global', for which they're billed $375 per annum, plus copayments.

Re:Chinese work conditions

[frank_adrian314159]

Thanks to this bullshit (read: pension plans) the City of San Diego is for all practical purposes bankrupt.

Uh, excuse me? Last time I heard, the main reason that SD was bankrupt was because the folks in charge of investing the money in the SD public employee pension fund did a piss poor job of investing (mainly by focusing large amounts of money on derivative contracts). Blaming this on the employees is incredibly stupid. Or do you think that employees don't have the right to ask for pensions? Top level execs seem to have no problem doing this (last I heard Jack Welch was getting millions of dollars a year in pension benefits from GE; he's not the only one). But I guess they're entitled.

Re:But what about the rest?

[evilviper]

ECS isn't exactly the best, but they also aren't the worst. What about companies like ASUS, or companies at the other side of the spectrum like PCCHIPS?

I hate multi-page articles as much as anybody, but damn. In the SECOND SENTENCE it says in no uncertain terms:

After merging with PC Chips, ECS has recently started pushing into the retail market;

And for this, you got modded up. Wonderful.

Description of process is highly lacking

[dovgr]

The description of the steps of the production of the PCB is highly lacking. Here is a list of technologies used in the production of a motherboard that are not even mentioned in the article:

• Imaging: How the CAM patterns are transfered to the PCB. There are three different methods used in the industry:
  1. Plotter draws on film, conductor is coated with photoresist, pattern is copied from film to photoresist through UV light, photoresist is developed, washed, and the panel is etched.
  2. Direct imaging, which skips the step of using film and writes directly on a special photoresist. Precisition is much higher. Usually not used yet for computer motherboard, but only for high end mobiles.
  3. Build up. Instead of etching the material is deposited by electrolysis on top of the laminate.
• Drilling. Used for interconnections between surface layers of the motherboard. Old method was mechanical. Today the market is using laser drilling almost exclusively.
• AOI - Automatic Optical Inspection. Used at every stage of the production to find faults as soon as possible. It is much much cheaper to find a short on the bare PCB board, which can be repaired, then to find the same defect by a malfunctioning motherboard, which needs to be scrapped. Even the assambled boards are checked with AOI.
• Different chemical processes used for the build-up process.

On the other hand there were pictures from the cafeteria... ;-)