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."

Did any of the articles mention

[syntap]

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

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Chinese Women are Hot - Not!

[d474]

Dude, I lived in Japan for a 1.5 years. Among other nationalities, I hooked up with 2 Japanese girls, one of them was my girlfriend. They were both very sexual, so WTF are you talking about?

You are wierd.

Re:Chinese Women are Hot - Not!

[Omniscientist]

I can't speak about China, but I have a girlfriend who is from Thailand and she is extremely horny all of the time.

Re:Did any of the articles mention

[MidnightBrewer]

Those two ladies look to be in their thirties or forties and are probably housewives making some extra cash.

I've been living in Japan for three years now, so I'm used to it. If you think the ladies pictured are cute, then seeing twenty-year-olds would probably kill you. :)

Re:Did any of the articles mention

[d474]

From TFA: "Each worker handles two test stations at once..."

That is sooo HOT.

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 ;)

I always thought....

[O-SUSHi]

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

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?

[ozbird]

It's possible that boards are asexual and daughterboards "bud" off from motherboards, or there's a queenboard and a few drones hoping for a chance to father the next generation of boards.

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.

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?

[northcat]

And they get all those parts for much lesser than they cost in the market. They also buy a lot of parts in the same developing countries which, again, reduces their costs. And most of these are manufactured in developing countries where they have to pay much lesser slaries (why else do you think they manufacture there and there is a boom in offshoring?). No, I'm not trolling, I'm from one of these developing countries too. I'm stating a fact. Oh and BTW, the chipsets are also overpriced.

Re:Profit margin?

[imsabbel]

And what?
What is your point?
yeah, they buy the stuff with mass rabattes. Yes, the stuff comes from cheap countries (or it would be even more expensive).
Chipsets are too expensive?
Well, you only need 200mm^2 of monocrystal SI fabbed a 0.13um grade fab (pricepoint 1Billion$ min). Even if it would cost nothing to grow the SI and run the vast cleanrooms (a cleanroom can cost a few millions per month only for the electricity of the blowers),also people work for free, no maintainmence, ect, you would need to sel

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

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?

[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 th

Re:Profit margin?

[northcat]

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.

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. And this is usually recovered within the first few months. And the operating costs other than salaries aren't much. They get raw material cheap

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?

[mboverload]

They also have to licence tons of technology.

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 [bls-inc.com] 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 milli

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?

[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 hel

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 [gigabyte.de]

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

Re:Profit margin?

[burnin1965]

Gross is before other considerations, it varies depending on how accounting principles are applied but it is usually a good measure of how well your current products are doing.

Net profit will be smaller than gross and comes after deducting other expenses such as research and developement.

On the 2001 - 2002 financial statement for Gigabyte they factor in R&D expenses, general and selling expenses, interest expenses, taxes, and a few other items after the gross calculation. Basically what it comes dow

Re:Profit margin?

[burnin1965]

Agreed, however, these considerations are factored into the financial statements. Its possible they would not be included in the gross profit but they would definitely be included in the net. If you look at their financial statement you will see that net profit is significantly lower than gross so there is no magic bullet here for profitability. When it comes right down to it competition in the hardware industry is hardcore.

burnin

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

..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 [techreport.com]. Although this story seems more comprehensive you might want to check it out anyway.

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?

Re:MB most complex part?

[imsabbel]

Sorry, no.
The 3 months turnover STARTS with finished, nicely polished monocrysal wafers.
The zone-melting and crystal growing stuff doesnt even count into it.

Nice poster

[Anonymous Writer]

Check out that "fine motivational strategy" sign [pcstats.com] on page 10 [pcstats.com]...

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.

Re:Nice poster

[Rolo Tomasi]

The sign they didn't show:

This is no place for loafers.
Join me or die.
Can you do any less?

Good advice

[No Such Agency]

These are all solid ways to be better at your job... of course these motivations are never aimed at management, only workers.

Re:Nice poster

[devilspgd]

Make lesser mistakes?

I don't know about you, but I'd rather they don't make encourage mistakes big or small.

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???

[starman97]

All the parts on a motherboard are installed by pick and place machines. I wouldn't be surprised to find that on high volume runs, no human hands ever touch the board or any of the parts on it.

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.

Re:Motherboards most complex part of PC???

[CProgrammer98]

This is slashdot, so of course, you didn't bother to RT(very intersting)FA did you.

You are SO wrong... go read it...

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" :-)

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?

[Legion303]

And since the designer gets local wages, you'll be swimming in a pool of money a la Scrooge McDuck in no time! Oh boy!

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[malkavian]

At a rough guess, a combination of Architecture, Mech Engineering, Civil Engineering and Electrical Engineering are the main culprits.
Get your degree, then spend 10 years doing the legwork to get you enough experience, and maybe, just maybe, you'll end up designing a small part of a building like that.

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[pipingguy]

Probably start with a degree in mechanical engineering and work up from there. Or just get an entry-level job as a janitor and work your way up via brown nosing. Of course, janitors at these places are likely a few levels up from emptying wastebaskets and fishing out unrepentant turds from toilet bowls.

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 t

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[LighthouseJ]

Some people say Industrial Engineering but that Engineering discipline isn't as widespread as the Electrical/Computer, Civil, Mechanical Engineering disciplines. If you want to get into fabrication, you should look into Electrical Engineering if you cannot find a discipline closer to manufacturing. For example, my school has an option to take fabrication classes under the Electrical/Computer engineering program where you design and then build a custom IC. You pick the size, how many pins and then put wha

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[LighthouseJ]

Here they do that too, I'm saying how far back in production they start, beginning at deciding what they want (MOSFET's included) and then the dimentions of the chip, arrangement of pins and then until the chip is actually made. So, to summarize, my school is just as good as your school, probably better because you don't go to it.

Re:Education required for designing these plants?

[Black Acid]

What school is that?

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.

Re:Awesome

[rah1420]

I have been fortunate enough to work once in a line sort of like this (although much less complex) but also in a microelectronics fab where they make the chips. Manufacturing is some way cool shit.

Too bad I only got to page 8 of TFA before the site got slashdotted. Oh well, I'll check it out later...

Re:Awesome

[binarybum]

agreed. some of the video footage on MRN was really superb. Some of that stuff was completely mezmorizing - I specifically recall a tour of a tri-cycle assembly line that was beautiful. watching robots work is like listening to a good drum machine rhythm.

Re:Awesome

[NickDngr]

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.

Check this site [stanford.edu] out. I think it has what you are looking for.

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) Transportatio

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)

Be happy but be aware

[awfar]

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

Re:Be happy but be aware

[Glowing Fish]

Typical monthly salaries in Taiwan are from 500-1500 dollars.
Prices there are often much cheaper (ie a two bedroom apartment in the city is 200-300 dollars), and when that is factored in, the people in Taiwan have a standard of living that is about equal to Americans, and exceeds it in some ways.

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.

Much like any engineering discipline.

[Inoshiro]

You should test software longer than you write it. You should verify building layouts longer than you take to make them. You should ...

Verification of correctness is very important, otherwise you get a poor reputation quickly and won't be purchased by people anymore. Unless you're a monopoly.

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.

readme:

[Creepy Crawler]

If yous opens it, please carefully closed [pcstats.com]

you thanks us.

Other factories

[sm8000]

Abit: http://techreport.com/etc/2004q2/abit-tour/index.x ?pg=1 [techreport.com] ECS/PC-Chips: http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1891&p= 1 [anandtech.com] AOpen & Asus: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mobofactories/ [digit-life.com] Chaintech: http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/articles/cha intech_taiwan/ [sharkyextreme.com]

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...

Re:Writter oversimplified PCB Process

[spaceyhackerlady]

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.

I wouldn't have minded seeing that part of the process. Modern boards have zillions of layers for circuitry, power distribution, grounding and shielding. It must take some doing to get them right, let alone manufacture them.

The first Pentium I

Re:Writter oversimplified PCB Process

[protohiro1]

The PCBs are printed on with a photographic process. It is a lot simpler to manufactur than you might think.

Coral CDN

[gfilion]

Spare that poor server, use a mirror from Coral CDN [coralcdn.org]

page 1 [nyud.net] page 2 [nyud.net] page 3 [nyud.net] page 4 [nyud.net] page 5 [nyud.net] page 6 [nyud.net] page 7 [nyud.net] page 8 [nyud.net] page 9 [nyud.net]

page 10 [nyud.net] page 11 [nyud.net] page 12 [nyud.net] page 13 [nyud.net] page 14 [nyud.net] page 15 [nyud.net] page 16 [nyud.net] page 17 [nyud.net] page 18 [nyud.net] page 19 [nyud.net] page 20 [nyud.net]

Live Facility Tour?

[drwhitt]

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

well you see

[FidelCatsro]

Well you see little Johnny , It all starts when Granfather-Board and Grandmother-Board Decide they love each other ...

Re:well you see

[serutan]

You read my mind, or what's left of it.

high tech

[binarybum]

are those load bearing paper clips? [pcstats.com]

*yawn*

[nurb432]

Havent anyone ever seen a modern manufacturing plant? ( or supported )

Sure the end products may vary, but in principle they are all about the same.

Pretty boring stuff.

Doesn't surprise me, the MB *is* the computer

[cbreaker]

The mainboard is the computer. Especially now a days, with all the integration - gone are the days of a CPU slot, two chips, and some ISA slots.

The CPU is obviously important, but it's almost secondary to the duties that modern mainboards perform.

What?! You mean....

[urlgrey]

... it's not just twigs, bubble gum and duct tape inside a computer box thingy? (Oh, and blinky lights?)

But... but... but.. What's all this talk of 'transistors'? And what am I going to do with all this extra duct tape I bought to fix things in there when it breaks?

I'm a little afraid to open it now, and I thought I'd just worked up the courage.

[sigh] Now what? [/sigh]

Temperature control and other notes

[Animats]

It's impressive that they can run boards with SMT components already soldered down through a second pass, a wave soldering machine for the components with leads. That must take really tight temperature/time control. Especially with the newer lead-free solders, which have higher melting points.

It looks like they put their automation budget into the SMT part of the operation. The components with leads are inserted by hand. Automated machinery exists for those jobs, but they may not want to be stuck with

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 l

Re:All that work but....

[real_smiff]

...Besides, always be carefully to store the BIOS source code correctly in your disks as if you update the wrong BIOS, it will be a nightmare.

lol, yep this really is in their newest manuals. and i think it looks horribly unprofessional, but maybe english speaking retail market is small enough for them not to care? Do G-B have much OEM market share? i wonder what their spanish, french etc. translations are like.. if they're translated from the English, it makes you wonder :p

Just bought a Gigabyte board be

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 198

Ever wonder how motherboards are made?

[BorgCopyeditor]

By a largely automated industrial process comprising several distinct stages?

How naïve. Motherboards are constructed by a series of blowjobs.

(stolen from Mr. Show [tvtome.com], like most good things.)

As corny as this may sound

[theolein]

Thanks slashdot for posting a nice geeky article for a change.

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.

Re:PCB

[imroy]

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

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 [google.com]

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 [google.com]

Re:PCB

[shirai]

If you have a chance, you should check out the link above [google.com] 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

Re:PCB

[mcknation]

In the interest of brevity you can find the deffinition in the top right hand corner of your screen if you just type in

PCB

or

Woman

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ymmv, works for me about 90% of the time. /McK

Re:PCB

[Rhinobird]

This one time my friend did some PCB and he started kicking the crap out of his computer, while screaming something about deamon windows or something...wait...are we talking about the same thing?

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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?

Solder resist

[msgmonkey]

The boards themselves are made from fiberclass and are opaque. What gives a board its green colour is the solder resist that is used to stop solder sticking to the tracks during wave soldering and stop the copper from oxidizing. So basically yes it is a stylistic change and not due to any change in the manufacture process materials for pcbs.

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!