How Motherboards Are Made 141
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."
Sad truth... (Score:4, Interesting)
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2. low value has nothing to do with the fact that it's cheaper to use humans instead of robot, if robots can make a better product, faster, cheaper then human counterparts, they'll use robots. regardless if the end product is cheaper or not.
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A very interesting observation, in light of the current expose of child labour being used in factories in China. One has to wonder what conditions exist in factories where people don't get guided tours.
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.
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2. I didn't say anything about Taiwan. In fact, I was addressing the other factories that make our shiny trinkets, not the one featured in the story. I said that.
3. Taiwan offers a lot better opportunities than the main land does, but you're making it out to sound like Japan. Maybe someday,
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this article is about a factory in Taiwan run by a Taiwanese company. also, please get a clue about Taiwanese history and its political situation. i happen to be Taiwanese and have lived in Taiwan for many years. i also have a Taiwanese passport coincidentally and have had to travel on it before I received my American passport. i know all about the nominal dispute between Taiwan and China. the fact is they are, and have always been, two completely different political entities and independent societies with
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2. Are you actually suggesting that it's not the official position of Bejing that Taiwan is part of China? You don't have to be Taiwaneese to understand [china.org.cn] the very [chinaconsulatesf.org] clear [people.com.cn] language [iht.com] they've used.
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i chose to respond to you because your post was a continuation of a false premise laid by the poster before you--i understand that. i figured you and the original poster would both read my post if i responded to you rather than the first post.
secondly, the position the chinese government takes on many issues diverge from reality. that was the point i was making.
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Bleeding-heart westerners often this ridiculous notion that workers should be treated well everywhere in the world. This is an idealism that does more harm than good. It is far preferable to have 100 workers working for a
Western Economic Hypocracy... (Score:1)
> particularly comfortable, there is a flip-side to the issue. That
> flip-side is that at least these people are working, and usually at
> least making enough to feed their families.
How horrid it must be for people earning $0.10 a day(!) to find that some Westerners (such as yourself) deem it acceptable to purchase things made by people earning so little for their effort; while those same Westerners would not even get out of bed
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You want to k
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> basis, only that one's about Wal-Mart in India. First, it costs a
> lot less to live there than it does here.
Sorry - wrong.
A person in China wanting to purchase a CD (from for example, Amazon.com) would not be able to afford it - because that CD would still cost the same US$$ to purchase from China/India/Fiji/Indonesia that it would to purchase it from the UK or from the USA.
What you are actually advocating is that people in the "
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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?
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When you say everything can be automated, I think you overestimate the state of robotics.
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By using the word robotics, I'm lead to think you're completely unqualified to make any statement regarding the state of industrial process automation.
Wrong by your own logic (Score:2)
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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.
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>> Now everybody has those long lines of low-paid women in some low-wage area.
First, it's not a bad thing to provide employment for people. You might recall the auto unions terrified that robots would replace workers. So using people to assemble things is not a bad thing.
It's actually pretty difficult to make an automated machine that c
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> car washes to "100% hand wash" over the last 25 years.
That's because hand-washing a car generally does a better (and gentler) job of washing the grime off your car, and you employ a few people to do that while you're otherwise shopping and needing to have your car parked somewhere.
Prior to the robotic car-wash facilities your only choice was to wash it yourself, or to get a family member to do it for pocket money.
Now you can actually give a le
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Best to keep the masses in debt up to their eyeballs, chasing after that $1000 HDTV... otherwise they might not want to work!
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Just because you know how a McDonalds burger is made, doesn't mean you know how Hard Rock Cafe makes theirs.
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This is not physically strenuous work. It won't cause poisoning or RSI or heat stroke. There's no high likelihood of disease or injury. The main downside is that it doesn't pay well.
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What's so sad about repetitive hand labor like placing components on a PC board? I've done this sort of stuff, and it's some of the easiest, most absorbing and satisfying work possible. At the end of the day, I went home happy and energized, ready to tackle the real problems in my life, or play, or relax.
This is not physically strenuous work. It won't cause poisoning or RSI or heat stroke. There's no high likelihood of disease or injury. The main downside is that it doesn't pay well.
You need to stop kidding yourself. I've worked at McDonalds for a year. Nothing energizing or satisfying about doing your best for $5.50/hour only to be turned down a raise after a whole year of work. Why should they give me a raise? They can just get rid of me and hire the next person that applies for the same $5.50.
I've talked with some [engineering] friends who have worked the assembly line at GM. Open chassis, insert part, close chassis. For 8 hours. The only people I know that would call that absorbin
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Re:Sad truth... (Score:4, Insightful)
How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Insightful)
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joking aside, funny doesn't give karma, insightful does and many jokes also are insightful in a way.
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Funny)
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> And then the motherboard meets a fatherboard, and the result is a board.
And then the motherboard meets a fatherboard, and the result is a daughterboard.
Then there's the Eddie Murphy special... (Score:2)
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"I don't know what this machine does, maybe it makes the boards" - it's the damn screen printer that pastes the solder onto the board, and the woman isn't "removing the edges" she's stuck in a tiny booth all day removing flux from the through hole components.
I can think of heaps of peole, myself included, who would have loved a trip like this, and could have made a
Re:How motherboards are made (Score:5, Insightful)
Also there was much more detail on the ATE and soak testing.
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I'll maybe consi
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> that made sense, and did justice to the hard work and conditions those people work in.
So true. If I was forced by circumstance to work for pennies a day dully repeating the same task over and over again like a soulless automaton, breathing in noxious vapours and having nothing to look forward to in my working life but countless hours of soldering, I know that my biggest
The result is a baby ATX.... (Score:5, Funny)
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"Well, first the grandfatherboard and the grandmotherboard have to love each other very much. And then they have a very special cuddle, and the grandfatherboard puts his pin into the grandmotherboard's socket, and then there's a motherboard."
And when the motherboard is mated into a system she also gets a daughterboard.
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You missed a perfect opportunity to point out that the grandmotherboard has a ZIF [wikipedia.org] socket.
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.
Safer not - Re:Cheaper by hand (Score:2)
Or maybe programmers are just charging to damn much....
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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 crevices. You just hang whatever needs to be painted on a conveyor chain going into the paint booth, and the robot does the rest.
We need more technology like that to stop the downward wage spiral.
Extra hyperlink (Score:1)
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In Soviet Russia.. (Score:1)
funny. (Score:1)
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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.
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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!
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You are right about the solder paste squeegee machine and the soldering oven (the "adhesive" is solder) and BIOS programmer and hand-stuffing of connectors. The automatic assembly only works for brick-shaped surface mo
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Oh, you can complain. Just don't expect anything to be done about it.
Well, OK that's not entirely fair... you'll get modded to 5, but that's about it.
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I personally had a good laugh at the picture at:
http://www.extremetech.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205
which says "Motherboards are made from printed circuit boards (PCBs), which, as the name suggests, need to be printed or etched. Here's where that happens.", and an unknown machine is shown. No, that's not where the PCB's are made. The PCB construction is a very complex and accurate chemical process that in
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1) The above poster is correct in that the first pic we have is a Screen printer. It's function is to apply solder paste to the PCB. The m
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This is a late reply, but one interesting thing about the pick-and-place machines is that they're putting several G's of acceleration laterally on the boards when they're placing components. What this means is that even though the board has solder paste on all the p
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Heresy!!!!!!! (Score:4, Funny)
Been done before... (Score:2)
More indepth for those who care. The flowing solder is (to me) th emost interesting and sparse par however, though AMD (did) have a few interesting articles on how mass automated soldering is done.
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And the article linked to in the parent's comment is much more detailed and informative! This is what should have been submitted instead!
Another shitty hardware review article (Score:1)
Last picture (Score:4, Interesting)
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A link to a blog entry re: this product: http://toshuo.com/2006/truth-in-advertising-ii-the -nutrition-carrier/ [toshuo.com]
Another brand of EYP: http://fuma.en.alibaba.com/offerdetail/57475826/Se ll_Egg_Yolk_Pie_32pcs_.html [alibaba.com]
I thought it was common knowledge (Score:1)
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Well, the Elves were whispering about unionizing so it got outsourced.
..and the final product! (Score:1)
Got to love this image (Score:5, Funny)
1. Be more responsible
2. Complain less
3. Be more attentive
4. Make lesser mistakes
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Now that's interesting... (Score:1)
Never Underestimate... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Never underestimate the power of 10 million low-paid Chinese.
Taiwanese != Chinese (Score:2, Informative)
I fail to see the relevance of a comment about "10 million low-paid Chinese."
That was a pretty article (Score:1)
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.
He was surprised... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Why pay for robots when you have an endless supply of poor people willing to work for 1% of the cost of one mother board a week.
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Will it be on "How It's Made?" (Score:2)
Widgets (Score:2)
Went downhill from there...
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The chocolate is mixed by waterfall.
And it's the only chocolate in the world mixed by waterfall, did you know that?
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Does anybody know what the missing step is?
Sure do! It's "2. Do not stress the importance of a clean, reliable power source."
That'll kill a motherboard faster than anything but liquid or toddlers. Get a decent, non-generic UPS, and run any cable/modem/network cabling through it as well. We had a similar issue out at a client of ours... Turns out that the juice at two stations, due to an ANCIENT voltage converter box, were only running at 96 volts. Make sure you've got 110v [US] or a good 220v for Europe.
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Reality is racist. Deal with it.
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(and I know that every one of you ARE racist, even if you think you're not) and I don't think that's what's going on here, but definitely condescending. America isn't the center of the universe, yo. It's a dying empire that still has some bux to blow!
Well it's a good thing we have nice guys like you to straighten us racists out!