ABIT Factory Tour in SuZhou, China

SMD Line

Let’s take a quick look at ABIT’s production lines before talking about what we’ve seen in ABIT that is different from other factories we’ve been to.

The motherboard and video card manufacturing process is practically the same in all factories. The printed circuit board (PCB) starts the process and solder paste is applied were SMD components will be installed. Then the board goes to the SMT insertion line (SMD and SMT are practically synonyms; while SMD refers to the components, SMT refers to the soldering technology). In this line robots pick and place SMD components in their proper location. After SMD components insertion, the board goes to an oven, where the solder paste will be melted, soldering the components to the board. After this process and in several point during the whole manufacturing process employees (usually women) visually inspect the board looking for errors.

Figure 4: Overall vision from ABIT SMD lines.

Figure 5: One of the motherboards that were being manufactured during our visit to this factory.

In ABIT’s case, after finishing the SMD line process, one machine does the visual inspection quality control. Not all factories have this machine. This machine is programmed to visually inspect certain spots on the motherboard. If the spots are not well soldered, for example, the machine says so and the board is sent to one of the employees for correcting the error. As we mentioned, usually for quality control female workers are used, since it was already proved that women can find errors more easily than men. Besides the automated visual inspection, the manual visual inspection done by a female employee is still used.

Figure 6: Visual quality control.