ABIT Factory Tour in Suzhou - Storage and SMT

The first stop is the storage area. In this shot we see a collection of boxes mostly likely containing a batch of the latest chipsets from Intel. However, when we visited the factory, ABIT were in a two day phase of producing AMD based motherboards as they had just finished a week long phase of producing Intel based motherboards.

The production process starts with the bare PCB (Printed Circuit Board), in this case the NF7 - ABIT's nVidia nForce2 based motherboard for Athlon XP. ABIT do not produce their own PCBs at this factory, instead the production is outsourced to another company.

The first stop of the PCB is this machine which prints the metal traces onto the motherboard.

Once the metal traces have been placed on the PCB, the motherboards proceeds along the assembly to the machine you can see above. This is an SMT (Surface Mount Technology) based machine. This machine's role is to lay many different IC's onto the motherboard in a very quick fashion and in a very intelligently programmed way.

The IC's are tape-feed into the machine, as you can see in the shot above.

The PCB then continues its journey along the production line through the oven which you can see above. The idea of this machine is to heat up the PCB enough to melt the traces and keep the ICs in place until they are properly soldered on, later down the line.