Gadgetory

everyone we're at the gigabyte Factory in Taiwan where motherboards and video cards are made gigabyte makes about 200,000 motherboards here per month and 200,000 video cards here per month total 450,000 units the other 50k there are from things like systems laptops things like that so gigabyte has moved a tremendous amount of its operation to Taiwan and today we're going to walking through some of the SMT lines we walk in through dip one of the other line so that's a different floor we'll be looking at and this will give you a full start to finish look at how motherboards are made and the same exact process applies to video cards so we'll be looking at I think the be 360 aorist gaming three is the motherboard we'll be following through the start to finish today but it's the same process for everything so SMT lines are pretty cool we'll start with a solder paste machine it eventually goes through optical inspection it goes to reflow it goes through pic in place and we'll be doing voiceover to explain all those because there's a lot of information here to get through so let's start with the factory tour of gigabytes of motherboard and video card factory nan pain Taiwan before that this video is brought to you by the Corsair 1i 140 compact gaming PC the Corsair 1i 140 is a small form-factor PC outfitted with a 9700 K RT x 28 e 32 gigabytes of RAM and a 480 gigabyte nvme SSD all house then a 2 millimeter thick aluminum chassis the corsair 1i 140 is a 12 liter system fit for desktop use for the same size I 160 counterpart with higher-end parts learn more at the link in the description below gigabytes factory is split into a few different areas there's the BIOS programming station the semi-automated packaging line and the SMT lines where eleven different lines prepare around 400,000 video cards and motherboards every month this process is identical for the video cards and the motherboards the only thing that changes is which components are being mounted to which boards but otherwise for either product the same steps apply so let's start a tour with the SMT lines these surface mount technology lines are arranged in eleven identical rows stretching halfway across the factory floor and containing mostly identical machines for each row as some tea lines are fed with service mount components like small resistor is MOSFET so forth so that the components can be placed on the board these are provided in spools and reels by third party suppliers allowing the machines to maximize efficiency since spools are replaced by hand but they can still feed through thousands upon thousands of components before being replaced each motherboard made in this line has between 1200 and 2400 service mount components on it depending on the board complexity but something like the z3 90 godlike using more parts than most today we're following the B 360 gaming three at least for this floor the first step is for the blank PCB typically delivered from a PCB supplier in China to be loaded into trays that the SMT line pulls from each board is set onto a conveyor belt via automation where the blank PCBs first stop is to go through a solder paste machine the solder paste machine can process about 150 boards per hour using a screen to apply a paste to the correct areas of the board later in the process solder paste will be used to secure components and connect them to the board but for now it's just getting applied and one board takes about 24 seconds to go all the way through this machine the screen is cleaned every 10 minutes to ensure it doesn't get gunked-up it can be thought of sort of like a silk screen for printing shirts so that be about once every 25 boards for cleaning the screen after the solder paste machine an automatic optical inspection machine or Aoi machine is used to ensure each solder ball has solder paste applied this is done with either 2d or 3d Aoi machines with a ladder being more expensive and more detailed MSI primarily showed us it's a 3d Aoi machine called VTR 7007 s2 plus which can check data for every single pad on the motherboard after the motherboard passes initial Aoi it's fed into the next set of SMT machines for surface mount components these machines are called pick-and-place machines named for their obvious tasks in the service mount line pick-and-place machines go through reels upon reels of components starting first with these smaller parts and graduating to larger components later down the line each section of the pick-and-place machine takes about seven to twenty seconds for mid-range motherboards or video cards but cycle time loss is reduced to about three percent as a result of running at two different internal conveyor systems in parallel each station in the line is responsible for about 100 components with 15 stations in the SMT line total components are loaded via reel and spat out rapid-fire almost like a Gatling gun with each reel of components containing about 10,000 pieces so these also include pre-programmed BIOS chips which happens in another section of the testing floor we can show that as well the BIOS programming machine will write BIOS to the chips and prepackaged them into a real format and once the reel is full a technician wheels it over to the SMT line to be fed into the machine and placed onto the motherboard for the video card at this point in the process the components are placed on the board in the solder paste but they aren't really secure the last item is to place the socket which goes onto the BGA for the CPU pin array the socket is contained in a tray format rather than a real format as it's the largest component on the board so it goes at last this order of smallest to largest is partly done so that the machines can work lower down with those Gatling gun outputs sitting closer to the board so that it can work faster and more efficiently only having to elevate the machinery toward the end of the line the next machine is the reflow machine which accepts parts via conveyor belts from the 15 pic and Playstations the reflow machine heats the motherboards or video cards to about 250 to 200 67 degrees Celsius and an oven joining the solder pastes the pads and the components to the PCB the oven used here is a 1913 Mark 3 and takes about 5 minutes to heat the solder and secure all the parts to the board the conveyor belt trudges along next bringing the mostly completed board down the line to skilled technicians who hand test the products to ensure that they function and have some level of required quality the motherboards are plugged into semi custom circuit testers ensuring that everything is connected and detecting properly with one technician manually overseeing the automatic optical inspection results to check for false positives the entire start-to-finish process is about 30 minutes for this part of manufacturing but we're still missing the PCIe slots the batteries and the heat sinks we also still need to follow the boards through the testing process as the board's finished this part of the process they are lightly packaged to be transferred to upstairs to the dip line or dual inline packages so now we're up on the next floor of the building and this section is going to be dip and testing as well so part of this is going to be more pic in place on machines more Aoi opt or optical inspection and then manual placement too so you'll see we'll talk through some of how the PCIe slots are actually placed manually and so are the CMOS batteries for example the battery container anyway and some of the other larger components power pin outs for example so about 30 percent of the process is automated but then the rest is still done by hand and after everything goes through pick-and-place and and through inspection and through finalization of the board you end up with a finished product which we'll talk through that but that process about 10 minutes and then the process on the floor we just saw is maybe about 30 minutes so it's actually a fairly long start to finish process and actually the boards up here are from the previous day so what they do is they go through one board at a time on the whole line then they bring it up they go through one board at a time on the next line and so it's about a one-day latency between the two and after all of this stuff is testing so let's let's talk through the process on this floor as well and get to some of the new research for the automated testing machines including stuff that I want like automated placement of memory modules and CP is the station right now is a demo of an old testing station from gigabyte so this is how it used to be done versus how it's done today which he just saw probably in the previous part of this video and all this stuff here is what was manually tested by the people working at the station so test every single cable every output you have all the ps2 cables audio cables old old old USB cables stuff like that this was done manually the CPU cooler is installed manually memories installed manually I mean it's basically you were building a whole computer just to test it and make sure the motherboard works which is clearly inefficient so gigabyte improved and moved on to the next step which was a gigabyte designed function box they call it and so what this did was allow that gigabyte to pre mount some of the hardware the fixed hardware like video cards the cooler to this sort of acrylic glass top piece and then close it down and clamp it onto the motherboard here and that would allow several of the pieces to remain unchanging and then the user only has to manually change a few pieces like CPU memory things like that and then the fixed items up here just close down on top of it and it reduced the workload now this is about ten years ago now the stuff we saw a second before that even longer ago and obviously gigabytes improved a lot of the last station here is just for training purposes so this would train the technicians which cable goes where which device goes where and if something was inserted incorrectly then you'd get an LED light up to say hey that's wrong so that they could correct it so this is this is then and the previous parts of the video you've seen the upgrades we're now gigabyte is moving towards more test automation including placement of things like the memory modules the next line starts with more pick-and-place machines with hoppers used to distribute some smaller components down to machines that place them into the motherboard an operator can dump small components into the hopper for automatic placement while the machine uses sort of an ammo belt for more SMD placement across the board as for the big connectors those get placed by hand the assembly lines he's skilled workers placing DVI connectors PCIe slots CMOS batteries and power connectors by hand as these components aren't sized in a way that the machines can really pick them up large ventilation systems are used to pull solder fumes away from the operators and safely exhaust them out away from the assembly line and it keeps the operation moving smoothly throughout the day while ensuring that it's still a safe work environment gigabyte sends the boards through another optical inspection line to check if the components are present or not it's just a 1 or 0 here with any boards detecting as missing components being sent to manual inspection for human oversight sometimes there are false positives and sometimes it just needs to be sent through for a component that got missed the socket is protected with a cover for these steps as the pins in the path are obviously fragile and now that the sockets on the board they need to be preserved each motherboard has serial numbers and they can be tracked start to finish so in the event of an RMA gigabyte can actually backtrack to see if something in the assembly process specifically caused the issue and so if there's some sort of assembly line error or machine error it can be corrected quickly and tracked easily finally heatsink and wireless modules are placed in manually and then the board is ready for the next line this entire process the one we just showed takes about ten minutes counting the SMT lines from the day prior that put the total motherboard build time from start till now at about forty to fifty minutes depending on how you count the transit time from floor to floor just counting the lines that we've shown thus far gigabyte process is about 600 to 800 motherboards per hour for about 5000 per eight-hour workday which means that in the time that we were there alone gigabyte went through thousands of motherboards or video cards in its factory finally after all of this the motherboards are sent to the packaging line the Box folding machine was unfortunately not in operation during our visit but we have footage of it from our 2016 visit that shows the machine working once the box for the day is built by the machine it's sent down the assembly lines of staff who individually packed the manuals CDs USB keys warranty cards and the motherboards or video cards themselves into the box and that box building machine is pretty cool it's basically just a giant punch and it's got a templated cardboard box that it can work with making it fairly easy to assemble during our visit this year the line was packing video cards rather than motherboards and these video cards are getting boxed and shipped out to various regions we saw some boxes for Holland some for the US and so forth each video card box exits the line and is manually placed into a larger cardboard box to be palletized and shipped internationally that box then rolls down the line it gets automatically taped and it also has straps applied automatically to ensure security of the box make sure nothing falls out loose and finally it exits the line and that would be the end of the motherboard or video card manufacturing process and that's the end of the product line so some video cards here they didn't have motherboards today because it changes based on the day but that covers gigabytes factories so thank you for watching as well as you can subscribe for more go to patreon.com/scishow stew help us for trips like this or store dock gamers access not an ad to pick up a shirt like the one I'm wearing today I'll see you all next time