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

Did any of the articles mention

[syntap]

the phone numbers of the girls testing the boards at the factory in Testing Stage 2?

Re:Did any of the articles mention

[digitalchinky]

Mmmm, nothing like that new motherboard smell, fresh out of the silver anti-static bag... Hot asian taiwanese chick writing on the little green 'QC OK' sticker...

If only motherboards were as soft and good looking as the testers, complete with dual breast cards as a standard option...

(In real life I'm not that much of a deprived geek, I am living in asia though)

I always thought....

[O-SUSHi]

Aren't they made when a motherboard has sex with a fatherboard and have another(mother)board?

Profit margin?

[Mortiss]

With the amount of work going into making of each motherboard and cosidering the amount of automation in the process how much does it exactly cost to make a single m/b? What is the profit margin when it arrives at my local computer store counter?

Re:Profit margin?

[imsabbel]

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...

Re:Profit margin?

[roman_mir]

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?

Re:Profit margin?

[hvacigar]

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.

Re:Profit margin?

[Klivian]

>Compared to how much they pay the workers Not so, the profit margin on the manufacturing part are low compared to the other cost. Having worked for 5+ years in that particular industry, in a non low cost country at that. As a rule of thumb we said 20-15% or less of the profit, depending of the amount of manual labor on the boards, was from the manufacturing process. Even with manufacturing in developing countries, you don't get that much higher profitmargins. Although very very very high volume does help a lot, when you accumulate the profit:-)

Re:Profit margin?

[JesseL]

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.

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.

Re:Profit margin?

[Klivian]

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.

Re:Profit margin?

[starman97]

A big part of the cost is hazardous waste disposal.
In the US you have to deal with all the lead and chemicals used in PCB manufacturing, in China, they basically flush it down the drain.

Re:Profit margin?

[burnin1965]

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.

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_093001 _02.pdf

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

..great

[mrsev]

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.

Re:..great

[MBAFK]

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.

Where are the fatherboards?

[Bongoots]

From my understanding, motherboards can have daughterboards.. but where are the fatherboards?

Illegitimacy seems rife in the computing world! o_O

Re:Where are the fatherboards?

[mysticwhiskey]

My guess is that the fatherboards refuse to perform garbage collection, misinterpret the communication protocol with the motherboard, and are constantly scolded for eyeing off the newer models of GPU's.

Thus they are kept in solitary confinement far from the eyes of the public and are used only to pump out offspring. It's solely for the XY86 chromosome, I'm sure.

MB most complex part?

[Bender_]

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.

Re:MB most complex part?

[pipingguy]

Yeah.

Where are the exotic industrial gases used? I'm assuming the stuff is used as a blanketing environment in the clean room manufacturing, but I don't really know.

I only help to design the plants that make the more mundane stuff like LOX, LIN etc. and never got involved in the really esoteric stuff.

Apparently, liquid nitrogen is used in the testing booths for checking operation at low temperatures.

Re:MB most complex part?

[rah1420]

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.

Re:MB most complex part?

[halldav3]

The most complex? Not even close. The disc drive is way more complex. The hard drive has a mini motherboard of its own, complete with processor, flash memory, dram (or ROM), high speed data channel, motor controller, etc. Oh, and did I mention the there are spinning discs in there with read/write heads moving a few nanometers above the surface?

Nice poster

[Anonymous Writer]

Check out that "fine motivational strategy" sign on page 10...

Be more responsible
Complain less
Be more attentive
Make lesser mistakes

Yay. I feel so motivated just reading it.

Re:Nice poster

[Lisandro]

"Demand less pay" is cut from the picture too.

Motherboards most complex part of PC???

[ferrellcat]

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?

Re:Motherboards most complex part of PC???

[vidarlo]

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?

Absolutely. A motherboard is a assembly of other parts. Although it requires some care to design it so all fits together, it is still just a assembly. Even southbridge is more complex than a motherboard...

Re:Motherboards most complex part of PC???

[big_groo]

I'm willing to bet that a lot less people are involved in the manufacturing of CPUs. Here, there is a greater chance for mistakes - more hands are involved. Can you imagine installin DIMM sockets for 8 hours per day?? You thought cleaning spyware was bad...

Re:Motherboards most complex part of PC???

[HadenT]

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.

must be the same guy.

[the_mind_]

The Guy that made the sign on the airshower door must be that same guy that translates the manuals that comes with the motherboards.
"Please Push and Pull the Door Tenderly" :-)

Re:PCB

[imroy]

Wow! And all this time I thought it was referring to Polychlorinated biphenyl. Man, they really cleared that up for me!

Education required for designing these plants?

[Radiate]

I was really facinated by the article and I'm curious as to what kind of education is required for designing these manufacturing plants?

Not that I'm an overoptimistic daydreamer but just curious..

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[Rostin]

I would add one discpline no one's mentioned: Industrial engineering.

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[chang3]

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.

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 /.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.

Oh, for those who are interested in some certain phone numbers: send some Karma over and I'll see what I can do.

Awesome

[ksilebo]

Not to sound like an ingrate, because this is really cool, but I'd love to see a video tour of this. Growing up in the 80's I have fond memories of randomly catching Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and watching him tour some factory. I'd like to see that in the factories today.

how much labour goes into each board

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of labour that goes into a board depends entirely on the relative cost of labour and machinery.

For a long time, we have been able to build completely automated board facilities. Since the seventies, we have been able to build and test boards completely untouched by human hands. Automation is really expensive so even in North America such facilities are rare.

Re:how much labour goes into each board

[rcs1000]

Actually, you need to add (at least) component sourcing as well. Lets assume that the finished mobo is sold for $80 to Dell or whoever. This has to cover:

(1) The Intel (or nVidia, etc.) chipset - c $40
(2) Various other components from Murata, Rohm, etc. - $10
(3) Labour
(4) Land, rent
(5) Manufacturing equipment
(6) Employees used to make the mobo
(7) Employees in R&D
(8) Employees in sales and marketing
(9) Management
(10) Taxes
(11) Random other overheads (telecoms, bandwidth, auditing fees)
(12) Transportation of the finished product to the US, or wherever
and, finally,
(13) Profit

Automation doesn't help that much. The cost of the employees actually making the mobo is tiny. Depreciation of components, or even shipping, are probably bigger expenses.

Little wonder that motheboard manufacturers make so little money. This a super-competitive industry. And we - as consumers - benefit mightily.

Cheers,

Robert

check

[tofucubes]

Are you sure it isn't being made by Oompa-Loompas?(the foreign race of people who are happy to work for basically nothing in a closed-off factory far from inspectors)

Re:You don't need their phone number - just use an

[a16]

If you ever been to Taiwan you'd know most girls there look absolutely great (it's not only me noticing this). I don't know how did they achieve it.

How do you know he's interested in their looks? This is slashdot - he probably just wants a free motherboard ;)

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

Be happy but be aware

[awfar]

Cheap hardware relies on someone willing to do it that cheaply; how long can this last?

Testing

[netrage_is_bad]

I find it interesting how much time they put into testing each motherboard. It looks like they spend more time testing it than assembling it.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in the US. Two MOTHERboards ?!? Sanctity of marriage !!!

Stress Tested

[Paska]

Each system is run through several hundred loops of 3D Mark 2001 in 40C temperatures. This tests stability under the most grueling of conditions.

Now I know why I've never had much luck with Gigabyte boards, they arn't tested to Australian climates, they really need to test these things in 50+C temperatures as you can bet my room in Australia gets that high in summer.

Re:Stress Tested

[Dogtanian]

Now I know why I've never had much luck with Gigabyte boards, they arn't tested to Australian climates

Actually, I think you'll find your problem is that Gigabyte motherboards aren't designed to work upside-down.

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/

Interesting...

[zappepcs]

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.

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:Writter oversimplified PCB Process

[Anonymous Coward]

4-6 is a conservative estimate. The company I work for has 14+ layer designs for our telcom boards...

Coral CDN

[gfilion]

Spare that poor server, use a mirror from Coral CDN

page 1 page 2 page 3 page 4 page 5 page 6 page 7 page 8 page 9

page 10 page 11 page 12 page 13 page 14 page 15 page 16 page 17 page 18 page 19 page 20

Live Facility Tour?

[drwhitt]

Very interesting process... Anyone know of any facilities that host public tours? In the US? In Europe? Etc.?

Re:Yawn.....

[AKAImBatman]

what is so special about the whole setup? Motherboards have been around for more than 20 years.

True, but what's up with the blue boards? They've been green for 20+ years, and yet in the past couple of years they've all been coming out blue. Are they using different materials of some sort, or is it just stylistic?

Re:PCB

[shirai]

If you have a chance, you should check out the link above on the definition of woman. It is unintentionally funny.

No respect I tell ya. Here are some (admittedly selective) excerpts:

• "the woman kept house while the man hunted"
  
• charwoman: a human female who does housework; "the char will clean the carpet"
  
• a female person who plays a significant role (wife or mistress or girlfriend) in the life of a particular man; "he was faithful to his woman"
  
• was "taken out of man" (Gen. 2:23), and therefore the man has the preeminence. "The head of the woman is the man;" but yet honour is to be shown to the wife, "as unto the weaker vessel"
  
• but one sure-fire way to remember this word is to think of basketball player Kobe Bryant, who is the guaranteed epitome of feminine
  

I like the definition that includes "mistress" then, for an example sentence, says "he was faithful to his woman." I can count at least three things ironic/funny about just that one definition. :)

Re:Yawn.....

[Matt_Bennett]

In general, board color doesn't make any difference- the color comes from the solder mask- you can use any color you want. Where I work the color of the solder mask tells you what revision the board is- red boards are the first iteration, usually pretty buggy, lots of reworks. It freaked me out at first when I saw all the red motherboards at Fry's- my first reaction was ACK!-- stay away!

All that work but....

[Bootard]

They can't even hire someone who speaks english well to translate the manual. The last couple of motherboards I've bought have been Gigabytes. They work ok, but the manual that comes with them is one of the worst translated things ever. Here's just on of MANY gems:

Have you ever updated BIOS by yourself? Or like many other people, you just know what BIOS is, but always hesitate to update it? Because you think updating newest BIOS is unnecessary and actually you don't know how to update it.
Maybe not like others, you are very experienced in BIOS updating and spend quite a lot of time to do it. But of course you don't like to do it too much. First, download different BIOS from website and then switch the operating system to DOS mode. Secondly, use different flash utility to update BIOS. The above process is not a interesting job.

Last one out please turn off the light....

[FLOOBYDUST]

Missing from the article

1. Local regulations concerning emissions and chemical handling

2. State/ Federal regulations

3. Local colleges/ school providing trained labor

4. Managers who know how to manage and make good decisions.

This article could have been written in the late 70's early 80's about any of the hi tech businesses that used to dot the Silicon Valley or Route 128 belt .This looked like the DECs, Teradynes, Western Electric/ LUcent/ATT , Wangs and Prime Computers of the 70s and 80s Circa 1983 I attended an auction preview at a Data General board fab plant. Similar equipment and processes, but DG was dying as was all the other electronic manufacturing capability. Today the same decline is seen in the design part of the business. .

The once vibrant pc board business in New England is as dead as the textile business. Once again the US is facing the results of not investing in the manufacturing base of basic industries. AS the manufacturing base declines so does the support industries and eventually the design jobs.

Engineering as a profession is not as attractive as it was 30 years ago. A recent Wall Street Journal article ( no link) told how today's senior hi-tech executives can't get their own children interested in enrolling in engineering school. So what is the point of this rant? If you are in the engineering profession today your chances of employment are average to good; there is no one coming up behind you but you better stay up to date . For those thinking of entering the profession; You had better love it and get a minimum of a masters degree in your chosen field of study and whatever you do avoid manufacturing and industrial engineering. There are no factories left. They are all gone.
.

You are clueless, Sir

[Donny Smith]

What the fuck are you blathering about?

Mobos lose money because margins are pathetic (and they're pathetic because of too much competition). And price competition is fierce not only in mobos but in virtually all components and parts that go into one (resistors, PCBs, capacitors, on-board chips, etc.). Even chipsets don't make money (at least in case of VIA - just look at their less-than-stellar results).
Because of all that, mobo manufacturers are extremely cost conscious.
For same reasons, there are almost no mobo factories left in Taiwan - they've all moved to China or (a few) to SE Asia. There's no way a company can afford to make mobos (at profit) in Taiwan. (I bet the factory in that article won't survive beyond 2005. In fact I was very much surprised to hear that there actually is a mobo factory in Taiwan that is still in use.)

Being the Gigabyte factory

[Trogre]

We must remember to include plenty of JPCON and GSC capacitors to get that healthy swell and electrolyte ooze after a year or so.