Slashdot Mirror
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."
The article is 2 months old
Nice nevertheless
Well I for one find this story great. I find it very interesting how the process is done. Finaly the 1st April shit is over.
from the articles: Without a doubt, motherboards are the most complex and essential part of the modern PC.
I dont know, I think the manufacturing process of the CPU and memory is slightly more complex. The entire process from wafer arrival to package shipments takes 2 to 3 month.
"Demand less pay" is cut from the picture too.
FTA..."Without a doubt, motherboards are the most complex and essential part of the modern PC." Wouldn't you say that the design and manufacture of CPUs are at least a level of magnitude more complex than mothermoards?
Cheap hardware relies on someone willing to do it that cheaply; how long can this last?
I would add one discpline no one's mentioned: Industrial engineering.
Compared to how much they pay the workers who manufacture them, almost all computer parts are highly overpriced - aha, but you want your cheap motherboard, don't you? Imagine how much that factory cost to engineer. A billion dollars? 2 billion? I don't know, but it looks very expensive to build and maintain and run on daily basis. So the firm has to recover the cost and then make a profit. So now if you paid your average US or Canadian or German worker salaries for running this factory and building these devices, wouldn't the MBs cost at least 10x as much? And you know what, they are worth the money. But you know what? Many people wouldn't buy them then. So the process depends on the economy of scale - the firm needs to sell to everyone, so the prices go down. The firm competes with a dozen other manufacturers, so the prices go down.
Of-course the manual workers are underpaid, but the robots are paid nothing at all, do we have to cry about it too?
You can't handle the truth.
From my second (or third) hand knowledge. Formal education (sitting in the classroom, etc) is not the main point. It really requires studying the problems at hand very hard and constantly tweaking and refining. They may speak lesser English, but they do know to pool experiences from all the displines mentioned in this thread together.
/.ers thought. And the compensation is HEAVILY loaded with bonuses and stock options. It is not unheard of the bonuses being several times of salary for a good year.
This is NOT to say whoever designed and maintained such a plant do not have education. Most of them have advance degrees. Typical job opening needs a college degree just to get the resume in. AFAIK, the salaries for entry-level engineers starts around US$15,000/year. Not great, but certainly not pennies per hour that some
Oh, for those who are interested in some certain phone numbers: send some Karma over and I'll see what I can do.