Making motherboards

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 fl oor, large (and loud) surfacemount 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 fl oor is mostly automated, the manual assembly line two fl oors 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 function 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 fl oor. 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 fl oor 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 subprofessional technical knowledge, watching the actual product materialise before your eyes is… well, eyeopening. 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.