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Making Motherboards The Gigabyte Way
By ,
1.

Enthusiasts may know tons about the hardware that comprises their PCs, but it’s much more difficult to fully appreciate how those components come to be. We spend so much time talking about bleeding-edge manufacturing processes and the millions of transistors etched into silicon, then distill the technology into its asking price without appreciating the R&D invested in creating a new product.

But let’s be fair. One reason the average computer user’s interest in the inner workings of tech is so superficial is that hardware manufacturers’ communication is deliberately simplistic. Fortunately, there are exceptions. At the last Computex consumer electronics trade show, which is held yearly in Taipei, Taiwan, Gigabyte invited the press to visit one of its factories. We obliged.

Come along, as we take you on a pictorial tour of how some of your favorite motherboards and graphics cards go from lifeless components to—well, lifeless, yet functional, hardware.

2.

Gigabyte is one of the top three motherboard manufacturers worldwide. The Taiwanese firm has several plants in Taiwan and its Nanping site is one of the largest. Located in Taoyuan, it has 1,200 employees and covers 45,000 square meters of floor space on eight floors.

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The Nanping plant is also used for the production of Gigabyte notebook and desktop computers. A total of 400,000 motherboards, 300,000 graphics cards, 20,000 cell phones, 15,000 desktop computers, 10,000 portable computers and 5,000 servers can be produced on the factory’s assembly lines every month!

During our tour of the Gigabyte facility, we didn’t get a chance to see how complete computers or cell phones are manufactured, so we’ll instead focus on motherboard and graphics cards.

4.

There are three main stages in the fabrication of a motherboard or graphics card: SMT, DIP and testing (we’ll tell you more about each of those acronyms in a bit). The different stages go through different assembly lines on different floors of the plant. The process is incredibly optimized, with very little left to chance.

5.

The first stage in the assembly of a motherboard is obviously the fabrication of the printed circuit board on which the motherboard is built. Gigabyte doesn’t handle this stage directly, but outsources its PCBs from a third-party specialist. The PCBs arrive in Nanping fully ready, with circuit traces, varnish coating, drillings and markings.

The PCBs are then sent to the first stage of fabrication: the SMT lines. SMT stands for Surface Mounting Technology. This process is used to solder small components that don’t need to be soldered through the PCB. They’re simply surface soldered.

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Before entering the SMT lines, we had to put on adorable little blue overshoes, then go through an airlock where we took an air shower. The shower’s purpose is to remove any dust adhering to your clothes, which might otherwise end up in a solder joint, where it would cause trouble.

7.

As we said, SMT components are simply soldered onto the surface of the printed circuit board. So the first step in the process is to apply a layer of solder paste to the PCB. That’s done by the Solder Paste Printer. A mask is used to make sure the paste ends up only on the proper areas of the PCB.

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Once the paste is applied to the PCBs, they’re taken over by automated SMT machines. These machines are equipped with several "heads" that pick and place the various components in the proper locations, while the PCB follows a predetermined path. The speed at which the machines operate is impressive. It takes them less than an eighth of a second to position a component.

9.

To maintain such a rate, a highly effective component supply system is needed. The solution used is a lot like a machine gun—components are encased in tape and stored in the SMT machine on reels. This system also makes it possible to change the setup of the production line for a new model very quickly. All that needs to be done is to change the reels and reprogram the machine.

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Only the smaller components are stored this way. Larger circuits, like chipsets, sockets and processors, are stored in racks. They’re placed on the board by slower SMT machines (one second per component). Optical precision guidance is used to place the components on the board.

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Once all the components have been placed on the printed circuit board, it goes into a convection oven heated to 250°C. The solder paste that was printed onto the surface of the motherboard during the first stage melts and solders the SMT components to the board. Proper completion of these stages is checked via visual inspection of the PCB.

12.

In addition to the visual inspection, the boards are tested electrically, using this machine. Contacts are made at certain predetermined control points. If everything is functioning properly, the PCB is then sent to the manual assembly lines.

13.

The majority of the components are now soldered to the board, but quite a few still need to be installed. They are referred to as DIPs, for Dual In-line Package, and generally have two rows of pins. These pins are inserted into the corresponding holes on the motherboard and are then soldered on. DIP components are different from SMT ones in that they’re soldered on the opposite side of the PCB. Today, DIPs are used only for components that SMT cannot place or solder. This includes PCI slots, rear connectors, SATA and USB connectors—any component that will undergo strong mechanical stresses.

14.

All these components are first placed by hand. The work is done assembly-line style. Each operator adds one component to the PCB, which then moves on to the next worker. Every station has one or more bins of components the worker picks from. The stations at the end of the line are in charge of checking all the components for proper positioning, sometimes by tapping on them, to make sure that all pins are seated in the proper holes.

These manual lines are even more flexible than the SMT machines. As an example, Gigabyte can change the model of the board being produced in 15 minutes on the DIP lines, compared to 30 minutes for SMT.

15.

After the almost fully automated assembly lines, these manned (most are actually populated by women) lines surprised us – especially because of how quiet they are. Except for the clicking of components knocking together, not a whisper breaks the silence. To guarantee a high work cadence, illuminated signboards on each line show the current performance rate in comparison to the objectives for the day.

16.

Once all the components are in place, they have to be soldered to the circuit board. This is no longer done manually. The process is instead completed in a single pass called “wave soldering, ” which consists of drawing the circuit boards across a cascade or wave of molten solder. The height of the wave is precisely controlled so that only the protruding ends of the pins on the components on the board are wet by the solder. The speed at which the circuit boards move, and consequently the duration of contact between the pins and the solder, is also closely controlled in order to ensure ideal thickness of the solder joints.

17.

Once the solder joints have cooled, the motherboard is electrically complete. But a final touch needs to be added—the heat sinks for chipsets and MOSFETs. Gigabyte again uses manual labor for this stage. A final check for proper placement of components is also made at this stage.

18.

Now fabrication is complete. Next, the boards have to be tested for proper operation. Gigabyte uses semi-automatic test benches for this. The network connectors, hard disks and CPU cooler are attached to a plate that drops down onto the motherboard in a single movement. Only the daughterboards need to be added. A series of automatic tests is run on the motherboard to test for proper operation of all the components.

19.

The motherboards that pass all the tests (almost all of them pass) are then sent to the final stage in the fabrication process, packaging. Again, agile human hands place all the items in the box.

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The motherboards or graphics cards are ready, packaged and packed in cartons of 10. They’ll be sent to the United States, Europe, Taiwan, Japan... in short, all over the world.