APC - September 2015 AU.pdf

technotes » computex 2015
Making motherboards
Ever wondered what
goes into assembling
a PC motherboard?
Shaun Prescott reports
after receiving a firsthand
look in Taipei
earlier this year.
Down on the fifth floor dozens
of production line workers
apply the more fiddly
components of a motherboard.
16 www.apcmag.com
As part of a guided tour to
coincide with Computex in
June, Gigabyte took me to
its Taipei motherboard
factory on the outskirts of the
city. Situated in a small industrial
town about an hour out of central
Taipei, Nanping is the biggest of the
company’s three motherboard plants,
with the other two – Dongguan and
Ningbo – based in China. Opened in
2000, Nan Ping employs 1,500 people
and produces 575,000 motherboards
per month. Each of these are tested
before shipping, and each are created
with a mixture of automation and
manual labour.
The only aspect of motherboard
creation not accounted for at Nanping
is the printed circuit board (PCB),
which is made in China. Otherwise,
each motherboard is crafted ‘from 0
to 100%’ at the plant. On the seventh
floor, large (and loud) surface-mount
technology (SMT) machines slot tiny
resistors and other chips onto the
PCBs, with several workers responsible
for testing the results at the end of
the line. These SMT machines are
capable of slotting in components
at a speed of half a second, with long
reams of tiny components fed into
the SMT automatically.
While the seventh floor is mostly
automated, the manual assembly line
two floors down is where the more
delicate work happens. That said, it
doesn’t look delicate — dozens of
Taiwanese women sit elbow to elbow
placing components at blinding speeds
— but a lot of care and attention is
afforded to the process and again,
every motherboard is also functiontested
before leaving the premises.
Each worker wears an antistatic
wristband, and each has trays full of
ports, chips and transistors, which
they apply as a conveyor transports
an endless stream of PCBs throughout
the floor. On the day I visited, the
target was 1,500 motherboards. That’s
a lot of USB ports manually slotted in.
Down on the second floor is where
packing happens. This is a thorough
process and, despite being the least
technical part, easily the most
fascinating: machines beat cardboard
boxes into shape while men and women
carefully place the motherboard,
cables, driver disc and all manuals
into the package you purchase at
retail. While the process of building
the actual motherboard may seem
remote and foreign to anyone with
sub-professional technical knowledge,
watching the actual product
materialise before your eyes is… well,
eye-opening. The next time you throw
your motherboard’s manual away,
keep in mind the guy tasked with
putting 1,500 of these into 1,500
boxes, every day. Each motherboard
package is then stacked into a bigger
box and sent directly from Nanping
to Gigabyte’s wholesalers.
That’s a lot of motherboards built per
day, and for what is arguably the least
sexy component of a PC, quite a lot of
work. For me, the tour was a welcome
reminder that PC components don’t
just materialise from out of nowhere in
boardrooms or retail outlets: they’re
painstakingly constructed by dozens
of human hands.
Shaun Prescott attended this year’s
Computex courtesy of Gigabyte.
A PCB passes through the automated
lines on the seventh floor, where larger
components are applied by machine.
Each worker wears an
antistatic wrist band to ensure
none of the delicate pieces are
zapped by rogue electricity.
On the second floor, packing
is also done manually.
Everything you get in the box
is placed there by a human.