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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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.

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.

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!

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: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: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: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.