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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."
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
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/
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.
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.
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