3 million motherboards is a lot. Just think about the amount of solder alone that must take, the amount of Japanese capacitors, the extra amount of copper needed to fulfil Gigabyte's 2oz copper pledge for each of its mobos.
The thing that will always stick with me from the beating heart of Gigabyte's Nan-Ping factory is the incredible amount of human labour it takes to assemble and test each and every board. That's the amount of boards the factory is capable of producing every year; three-million boards. In a single year. Assembled and tested by hand.
But the manufacturing process, with all its immense scale, is only part of story. Before the Chinese-manufactured slivers of PCB even make it to the gates of Gigabyte's high-tech factory on the edge of Taipei's Xindian City, the design process will have been in full swing, working on a new chipset design for a full year, while the research involved stretches back even further.
Sitting among the clouds above Taipei's banking district, high up in the 101 Tower, I've been talking to Gigabyte VP of Motherboards, Henry Kao and manager of the Product Planning division, Jackson Hsu.
With Intel's P55 chipset all set to go global, we've been chatting about what exactly goes into putting a new chipset design out on the street.
Self-referential
The Taiwan-based company has been working on the latest P55 chipset for the last year, as one of Intel's key development partners.
"We don't need the Intel reference design board, because we make the reference design board for Intel," says Henry Kao grinning broadly. "Intel has the idea for a new chipset and once they get it to a certain level they bring the design idea to Gigabyte so we can co-design the reference board."
It's this board that gets taken around the other labs so Intel can show them the new design layout. "With a new chipset we usually spend one year co-developing with Intel. Once it feels comfortable then it releases that design to the other motherboard makers. From there we'll make our own specifications and it'll be another month before the first working samples are available," says Henry Kao.
The initial design teams working on the co-development project will usually be a very small group of people. "At that stage you don't need too many people involved, just a single team, dedicated to Intel," says Jackson Hsu.
"Once the chipset is more mature, then we expand the team." Once the reference design has been finalised this is where the motherboard manufacturers can begin to create their own different spins of the same board to create their high, mid and low-end iterations of the chipset.
As a manager in the product planning division it's this part that Hsu has to be heavily involved with: "As a planner you know the basic chipset and CPU layout but need to start thinking what do I add? What would my competitors do and what does the customer need? And what is the latest technology? Then you have all the elements you need and you have to start picking them out. What do you need for your highest high-end, then lower down the pricescale, what do you take off? It's the same process every year, but the elements are different."
So how do you choose which components go into the higher-end boards and which get taken out? As ever the over-riding principle is based around cost. Sticking in the extra couple of USB slots that Intel are asking for on the P55 boards isn't a problem across a full range of mobos due to the miniscule cost, but other parts inevitably need trimming off the high-end boards.
Counting costs
Where the lower end motherboards suffer then is in the newer technology: "I can't have everything twenty-four phase," says Hsu about the twenty-four phase power that's used for stabilising the power signal of the top-end P55 motherboards.
That has to be reduced further down the board pecking order from twenty-four, to twelve to eight: "It's also about 6GB/s SATA we're using this year. Most of our P55 boards will have 6GB/s SATA; on the mainstream and high-end we'll have four ports, but lower down the line we'll have two ports. So even at the low-end consumers will still have access to 6GB/s SATA, but only two ports."
But cost isn't necessarily the over-riding principle governing Gigabyte's motherboard division as a whole. The current division CEO is a certain Mr. Lin, a man who has risen through the ranks right from the engineering floor. Now there's a man at the top who has hands-on experience of what goes into both the design and manufacturing processes.
This is where the aforementioned 2oz of copper came from. Slotted between the layers of PCB is this layer of copper, absorbing and distributing the huge amount of heat that is generated by both the processor, chipset and power phase regulators.
It's made the motherboards slightly more expensive to produce, but in the long run it has reduced the number of RMAs to such an extent that all of Gigabyte's motherboards are now adopting the same process.
Moving half of the company's motherboard manufacturing to this fairly new Taiwan-based factory isn't about cost either. The factory workers expect, and get, a far higher wage than their Chinese counterparts in Shenzhen, for example. And with three shifts working eight hours each that's a lot of man (or young girl for the most part) power to pay for every day.
But this factory is catering for the high-end motherboards and graphics cards, as well as notebooks, mobile phones, servers and full desktop PCs. And having a hi-tech factory of this sort on the doorstep of the research and development teams at Gigabyte means that it can rapidly turn around any design changes that it needs to make. And as Jackson Hsu told me later: "Some of our customers still like to have that 'Made in Taiwan' stamp on Gigabyte products."
So once all the design work has been done, and all the various iterations of a specific chipset have been thrashed out, it's on to the actual manufacturing process itself. The first thing that hit me – after I'd been kitted out in sexeh blue overshoes, swine-flu mask and had every mote of dust blown off my bloated form in the biggest hairdryer this side of Tony and Guy's HQ – is the amount of motivational material dotted around the factory floor.
Much of it seems to be for the international visitor as it's all in fairly broken English. In particular was a Deirdre's Photo Casebook-style storyboard showing how a poorly fixed nut caused the explosion of a Chinese Boeing 737 - a lesson to focus on even the smallest things or face the direst of consequences.
Another favourite was a sign in both Chinese and English instructing the workers to 'Be more responsible, complain less, be more attentive and make lesser mistakes.' It all seems to work though as the Nan-Ping factory is capable of shunting out a quarter of a million motherboards every month, as one of four Gigabyte factories in Taiwan and mainland China.
With a production facility working literally around the clock, across a range hardware, including graphics cards and servers as well – producing 50,000 and 5,000 per month respectively – the manufacturing bunnies have got their work cut out for them. There are four stages to both the motherboard and VGA manufacturing process carried out in Nan-Ping.
First is the Surface Mount Technology (SMT), where the smallest components are placed on the bare printed circuit boards (PCB). Second is the Dual Inline Package (DIP) where the larger elements are attached, then there's the testing stage and then finally it's down to packaging.
Each of these processes is carried out on separate production lines, and often on separate floors. For a single motherboard to go through the entire process though takes only around fifteen minutes from the start of production to boxed finish. The first step, the SMT process, is the most automated of the lot.
All of Gigabyte's PCBs are manufactured in mainland China to its own specifications and shipped over, bare, to the various factories. Once they hit one of the eleven SMT production lines in the Nan-Ping factory, each PC board is put first through a solder paste printing machine. This machine lays out the areas of solder needed to hold the components, which are then placed in the following step.
The smallest components, right up to the northbridge and southbridge chips, are held in different sizes of rolls, feeding their chips into either the high-speed or multi-function placers. These are like component nail-guns, shooting chips, resistors and capacitors into the motherboard with almost reckless abandon. Actually, they are in fact incredibly precise, with the high-speed placer inserting a component every 0.1 seconds.
Once all of these smaller parts have been placed on the board the entire PCB gets moved into an oven for what is called reflow soldering, which is basically melting and re-setting the existing solder to lock the new components in place.
The final part of the SMT process is the testing. At each step every motherboard and graphics board has to go through the same testing procedure; first comes the inspection, then in-circuit testing (ICT).
In this case, with up to 1,300 components on a motherboard, the inspection is done automatically with an optical inspector, which uses a strobe to check each component is correctly placed. In seconds. Then there's the first manual inspection, then the in-circuit testing which checks the electrical performance of the newly-placed components.
Dip and cover
This is where things become a whole lot more labour intensive; this is the DIP process. There are only four production lines in this part of the factory compared to the eleven of the SMT, but there are fifty operators on each of them manually inserting parts into the PCB.
The components that are added in this section are things like the PCI connectors, memory slots and all the inputs and outputs. The board is then put through a wave soldering machine, once all these larger components are in place to secure these latest additions and then passed onto another manual technician to touch up any missing solder or unsecured components.
It's at this stage that all the heatsinks are attached to the chipset. Once attached, there follows an almost identical inspection and in-circuit test to the SMT process. On the same floor as the DIP procedure are the six testing lines. This is where all of the boards, motherboard and VGA, get a complete check up.
First is the function test, where the motherboards are placed in testing benches and get a full functionality check-up. Then comes the burn-in test where each board gets subjected to a high of 45°C and then a low of -10°C, just to make sure the final setup can cope with the daily rigours that it might come into contact with.
From here it's on to the final manual inspection and then on to that final stage of packaging then on to retail. With such finely tuned electronics, it's always tempting to think of it being a completely automated process, something akin to a car manufacturing plant but with far, far smaller mechanical arms. The first time I had a chance to tour such a factory though it surprised me about the sheer level of human labour involved in everything.
So when you next come to buy a motherboard or graphics card, or even just take a peek inside your PC, take some time to think of exactly how many hands that bit of PCB has gone through.