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How Motherboards Are Made
mikemuch writes "Reporter Mark Hachman recently took a tour of a motherboard manufacturing facility operated by Gigabyte in Taiwan, and has posted a complete slideshow of the process. He was surprised by how much still had to be done by hand, but the company is still able to produce 1.5 million motherboards a month."
A few years ago I worked on a project at ABB Robotics (largest maker of industrial robots) and had the chance to often see their production lines. Once upon a time their assembly lines were automated to a large degree, until they realized that their throughput wasn't big enough to benefit from robots doing the work. People were cheaper and needed less maintenance. When you built a new robot model, you could use the same people - with little extra education required. Robots on the other hand required expensive reprogramming and testing for each small change.
When I was there they were just dismantling the last robot in the line - the one that painted new robots. Instead they outsourced it and now three guys in gas masks spray paint them manually.
An educated guess at what the two unknown steps in de slideshow were:
I think the first step where the author did not know what happened showed a machine for applying the glue for the surface mounted devices on the pcb. This step comes before the smd's are actually placed on the board. The glue keeps the components in place until they are soldered. I believe the glue is removed afterward, but I'm not sure.
The second 'interesting looking' thing looked like a device for transferring BIOS-IC's from plastic, tube-like containers to tape-rolls for the pick-and-place machines.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
This article isn't very impressive in terms of research, spelling or photographic quality. This is slashdot though, so I guess I can't complain.
When the author says "To be honest, I'm not sure what this machine does", from what I can see of the tiny photo, he's looking at a machine which stencils solder paste onto the exposed pads of the PCB.
When he says "The adhesive needs to be hardened, so the components won't fall off" he means the solder paste is melted then allowed to cool with the components in it, thereby attaching the components to the PCB electrically and mechanically.
When he says "BIOS Taping Area, I'm not quite sure what went on here" I would guess they are writing the BIOS code into the flash memory.
As he doesn't really explain, the reason people are putting connectors on the board manually even after the automated component placement stage is because the plastic connectors would melt in the heat of the oven, before the solder melted. So there are two processes: first the small, high tech chips are put on and soldered in the oven, then people manually insert the funny-shaped easy to melt parts, and they are soldered separately.
And now you know!
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
The fact that this was modded insightful and not funny makes me believe that Slashdot can only afford untrained monkeys to do it's modding.
Painting robots are getting smarter. I've seen some R&D work where a LIDAR scanner looks at the thing to be painted, the software builds a 3D model, a painting plan is generated, and a robot paints the thing, moving around to get all the surfaces and crevices. You just hang whatever needs to be painted on a conveyor chain going into the paint booth, and the robot does the rest.
We need more technology like that to stop the downward wage spiral.
TFA is about a company in Taiwan and Taiwan has about 23 million people.
I fail to see the relevance of a comment about "10 million low-paid Chinese."