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Take a Peek Inside the Dane-Elec Memory Plant
Megamuch writes: "The tweakers.net
guys got to take a tour inside the Dane-Elec memory factory in Ireland and have posted a pictorial tour of their trip. " They give a nice tour with lots of decent photos of the process that the comany goes through to package up chips. Fascinating stuff.
This is cool. I was trying to decide between getting some really, really cheap CAS 2 DDR by Dane-Elec, or some CAS 2.5 from Kingston. I'd never heard of Dane-Elec, but newegg sells their stuff. ;)
The Dane-Elec "DDR 512MB" CAS 2 seems to be the best deal I've seen anywhere: $102.00.
Now I can get it without worrying who this "no name" company is
Being blunt, it's because we're cheaper too.
The argument for keeping the work from going to
Asia is that for R&D and smaller development the
higer price point is worth it for higher standards
and the ease of communication afforded by working
with people whose native language is English.
Don't read any bias into the above comments, it's
what I'm told from working in the IT industry,
and yes, I've seen projects go to Wipro and
similar places.
(I'm a software engineer for a Canadian company
and my housemate works for a memory/disk
manufacturer. Location: Northern Ireland)
They're in the Republic of Ireland. Not England - the Dan-Elec plant is in Galway, Ireland - hundreds of miles away from England, in a (very) different country, on a different island.
It can be akin to calling Cuba the "U.S.A." or Israel "Saudi Arabia" in terms of social faux pas...
Actually we do about 1.3 to 1.4 million pageviews and more than 25 million hits per day. That's around 20 to 25 pageviews per second during working hours. Slashdot traffic adds up 2,5 p/s - not really noticeable. Fortunately we have plenty of headroom and no stability and performance problems with the database servers like we had before (MySQL 3.23.49-innodb is rock solid).
The Irish government has been making it very cost-friendly to build plants there. Additionally, they have a great deal of fresh water available -- which is one of the lifelines of a semiconductor plant (the water is processed to be de-ionized for use in numerous things - cleaning, processing, and reducing that 80 molar HF to something more usable - like 8 molar HF -- fun stuff. Don't spill it on you).
You also need a fairly well educated populace for a fab -- if you just take people with grade school educations they aren't likely to follow the very strict guidelines on cleanliness, dresscode, and operational procedures because they just don't understand what they're working with, and how easily it is to destroy. One worker can singlehandedly destroy several million dollars in production in a single day. So most fabs want educated workers (I dunno that this is necessarily a plus or minus for Ireland over SE Asia, just something to consider).
Finally, one huge plus for Ireland over SE Asia is language. Most (all?) Irish speak English, so when a manager from the US comes over they can ask a worker and not have to go through translation (well... ok... depends on how heavy an accent, but I bet you'll have more success than you would in SE Asia).
Did they fire you for being an id10t? IBM used Teradyne testers to test the DRAM because they were manufacturing chips not modules. Besides, the Teradynes have a very high throughput and allow a great deal of control over the testing environment. Somehow I don't think that throwing a module into a computer and running Quake 3 for a while gives much of an opportunity for quantity or quality of testing.
-h-
mentions how "Overclockers think your chips can get hurt at 100 degrees, but in this plant, they heat them to several times that"
Yeah. And overclockers re right.
A solder oven heats the board assembly slowly and uniformly.
It's large thermal gradiants that kill chips... differnet parts of the chip at different temperatures introduce evil physical stresses that mess up the guts.
Just like putting a person in hot water.. I believe tests have shown that humans can endure some crazy hot temperatures if they are heated slowly.
In a nutshell:
:-)
* Inside EU zone
* Insize Euro currency zone
* Natives speak English as first language
* Good coroporate tax rates (10%)
* Wages less than US and some parts of EU (althogh
they are rising)
* Time zone difference to US less than that of rest
of Europe
* Education system is well respected.
* Guinness