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Take a Peek Inside the Dane-Elec Memory Plant

Posted by chrisd on from the ooo-pretty-assembling-machines dept.

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.

10 of 107 comments (clear)

  1. Ah, finally.... by Idaho · · Score: 3, Funny
    Ah, finally a site that will be pretty hard to bring down using the SlashDot effect :)

    tweakers.net routinely handles about one million hits a day, go check their Statistics page, or check out some pictures of their servers and server room.

    Ofcourse the text is in Dutch, but I think you can read stats and view pictures in Dutch right :)

    --
    Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
    1. Re:Ah, finally.... by Femme+Taken · · Score: 3, Informative

      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).

  2. Not that exciting.... by seanadams.com · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This isn't a chip fab - they're just stuffing boards... still, nice photos of the whole process. I had a chance to see a shop like this in person, and took a bunch of photos and even some video (536K MPEG) of the process. The machines are quite mesmerizing (sp?) to watch, and it's amazing the amount of human and automated quality control that goes into manufacturing this stuff.

  3. Re:why are memory factories in ireland? by David+Kennedy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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)

  4. Re:because caucasians are just to damn tall. by seanadams.com · · Score: 3, Interesting
    things like PCI sockets were installed by HAND.

    Automated placement of large through-hole parts is generally not feasible because:
    • due to the size of these parts, they can't be handled efficiently by machines. It would take tons of packing material to put them in reels, and the placement arm would need a very large gripper in order to pick them up. Humans do quite well at pulling them out of a big bucket.
    • if the part has lots of pins, it's difficult for the machine to aling. These parts are often shipped in bags, and many of them will have bent pins. People are pretty good at fixing those one the spot...
    • there are usually very few such parts on a board, so its not even worth optimizing it if you could. You might have a couple PCI slots, a transformer, and giant cap, etc. It's not like inserting hundreds of little resitors by hand...


    Even some surface mount parts are installed by hand - you'd be amazed. Any kind of custom connector or non-standard package is probably installed by hand, even for volume production. SO-DIMM sockets, for example, are installed by hand - they have little plastic guide pins to align them.
  5. Re:Also ... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

  6. Re:why are memory factories in ireland? by Zathrus · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  7. Re:Man!!!! by HardCase · · Score: 3, Informative
    This artical is funny I worked for IBM in the DRAM final Test and we had 40 2.5 million dollar Teradyne Testers to test the chips and this company uses old 486s and Computers running Quake 3. No wonder why we at IBM got out of DRAM.


    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-

  8. ARticle by mindstrm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Re:Not 100% tested? by M-G · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I suspect when they say "tested" in the article, they mean those are subject to long term testing. Usually every device that comes off the line in a place like this is popped on a testing jig to be sure everything works, but only a small sample is hooked up in a lab for extensive tests.

    The quick test tells you if the board stuffing is working correctly (and you want to know this quickly to prevent further waste), and the longer test looks for hidden defects in a statistical sample.