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."

Comments

Re:PCB

[Anonymous Coward]

Whenever you have an acronym (you know, these capital letters tied together and meaning nothing) you can use the google "define:" feature :
Google define:PCB

It works with plain words too : this one could be of some use to the average ./er
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=define%3Awoma n

Other factories

[sm8000]

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/

Writter oversimplified PCB Process

[thebes]

Gigabyte out sources the PCBs (Printed Circuit Boards) it uses for its motherboards to a PCB manufacturer. These arrive already etched with the necessary circuit traces, pre-coloured and pre-drilled with the holes that are needed to insert components like the CPU socket and PCI slots. Other than this though, they are completely bare, containing no components or solder.

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.

Re:Profit margin?

[roman_mir]

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.