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How Motherboards Are Made
Techno-consumerist writes "Ever wonder how motherboards are made? How all those little electronic bits and pieces are put in place, and how each board is tested? PCstats takes a look behind the scenes of the Nan-Ping Gigabyte factory in Taiwan, and documents the amazingly complicated process from start to finish. Very cool, but surprising about how much labour goes into each board."
Yeah right. I mean, 50$-70$ for a Motherboard whose chipset alone costs 20$ from intel or via, not to mention the few 100 little (or not so little, like the elkos and fets of the voltage regulation stage) other parts, assembling and testing,...
Its way overpriced, i see...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Whenever you have an acronym (you know, these capital letters tied together and meaning nothing) you can use the google "define:" feature :
./era n
Google define:PCB
It works with plain words too : this one could be of some use to the average
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Awom
Last year I read an interesting article reporting on a tour of Abit's Motherboard factory. Although this story seems more comprehensive you might want to check it out anyway.
Abit: http://techreport.com/etc/2004q2/abit-tour/index.x ?pg=1
ECS/PC-Chips: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1891&p= 1
AOpen & Asus: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mobofactories/
Chaintech: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/cha intech_taiwan/
Design for manufacture is an engineering process that I've learned a little bit about, but doing the math... 22 8hr work days in one average month means they can produce 75+ motherboards per work minute! That is something to think about. Its always amazing to me to see the factory equipment, test benches look like stuff I've got in my garage half the time.
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For the ignorant ones, the making of the PCB's themselves is not a simple process. Think about the traces you see on the surface, then place about 4-6 layers on top of each other. The fact that the PCB's are outsourced takes a huge load off the remaining process.
Spare that poor server, use a mirror from Coral CDN
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IIRC, the "exotic industrial gases" are generally used either as dopants or cleaning agents.
I think regular old non-exotic inert gases are used for environmental air wherever it's needed in the wafer chambers, like for ion deposition and the like.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
As a person who works in the US Circuit board industry, I am offended that they start the production at the stuff stage on this explaination. Agreed, PC motherboards are not as complex as the boards we make for telecommunications and servers, but the actual beginning of this porocess starts with copper sheets and laminate material. The circuit board is produced before the stuffing with components. If you want to talk about margins, you have to factor in the complexity of this manufacturing as well. Some boards have 40 layers, each with dense circuitry and 30000+ 0.0010" holes per panel. If anything goes wrong with any of this, the time, labor, and material used in this board is lost. I can tell you that once you get to more difficult designs, chronic issues begin to eat into your margins a little bit. The reason motherboards are so inexpensive (yes I said inexpensive) is because they are not as complex as the othe types of main boards (or ICs), and labor in China is cheap.
This really isn't all as expensive as you might imagine. I work for a small electronics manufacturing company here in the US (The website is out of date, we currently have two Assembleon Opal XIIs and a seven zone BTU Pyramax oven). Among other things I program, set up, and maintain the Pick-and-Place machines. A simple production line capable of producing around 5-8000 motherboard sized boards a month may cost less than $750,000. A facility like the one shown in the article should cost well under $50 million. Interestingly, I expect a lot of this kind of manufacturing may move back to the US, since the cost of equipment is the same everywhere and the degree of automation makes labor costs nil.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
It looks expensive? That's something I'd expect to hear from an uneducated, unwise, five year old kid. At most these plants cost tens of millions. - oh really? The building itself where they are located is tens of millions of dollars. Tens of millions doesn't even begin to address the basic product line layout problems, you dolt. At Christie Digital where I worked on a contract the double door air shower itself cost over 50K. And that's not including the maintenance contract. It's not even about any single expensive machines (like their automated 8floor storage facility) it's about putting it all together. During my last contract the engineers I worked with talked about their experience of setting up much simpler plants for semiconductor manufacturing. That is in order of a few hundreds of millions.
You can't handle the truth.
Another very important factor helping bring down the cost of motherboards are the high volume manufactured. That said when it comes to circuit boards and things going wrong, I have first hand knowledge of the amount of "fun" you can have when management tries to increase profit by buying cheaper boards. Not only are the defects usually hard to find when the board is fully mounted, it's also a component you can't replace.
With a little research I think you will find that you are wrong about the pricing of computer parts. If you were to look at individual offerings for a company you would find that some parts have high margins while others have low margins. But the overall effect of the mixed margins and the extreme pressure of competition in the hardware industry is resulting in very low margins.
1 _02.pdf
And for some facts to back it up, take a look at Gigabyte's 2001 - 2002 financial statement at http://www.gigabyte.de/Company/Stock/pdf/fs_09300
Or to make it quick, in 2002 their overall gross profit margin was a mere 18%. $94,639,000(USD) / $498,739,000(USD) = 0.18975...
As a worker in the hardware industry I have the opportunity to see first hand the extreme pressure placed on workers to keep costs down all in the name of maintaining market share and sustainability. So you can imagine that when I hear some bozo from Microsoft telling the media that hardware manufacturers need to cut costs further because the cost of a PC with Windows is too expensive for the developing nations I look at the 80% profit margin at Microsoft and think that perhaps the solution is to dump the expensive Windows.
Anyhow, I'm starting to rant. I just wanted to point out that competition in the hardware industries is rather extreme and the result is very inexpensive components. In some cases they are inexpensive to the point at which sustainability of a business model becomes questionable.
burnin
You haven't read article then, big parts are mounted by hand, and then run through soldering machine.
In fact, my brother operates such solder, and sees women mounting capacitors/etc. all day long - it is hard and very monotonic job.
Note that small boards are often made in arrays, which are assembled and soldered as a unit before being pulled apart. Also, side rails to hold the PCB during automated assembly are often included in the bare PCB, which are cut off after it's assembled.
The above is for a 4-layer PCB, which is typical of PC motherboards. You can make a PCB with dozens of layers, but the fewer layers, the cheaper, and PC motherboards are very competitive, so designers have worked really hard to reduce the layer count. Motherboard chip designers know they have to pay careful attention to the order the pins come out of their chip so it won't cause layout problems!
Anyway, once you have the bare boards, the process goes: