Netbooknews recently took a trip to Kingston’s Hsinchu factory and caught the entire process of making and packaging a USB drive on camera. Please try to contain your excitement.
Thanks for the tip, Sascha!
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Didn’t Monty Hall use that same kind of microphone??
zee Germans shoot video in China.
That’s 4 minutes of my life I’ll never get back.
The presenter admits to not knowing much about electronics manufacturing. But that’s OK, allow me clarify some things before you watch the video:
In the beginning you see the person putting pre-etched circuit board “panels” into carrier magazines. Each panel has multiple USB stick circuit boards on them. Later you see a Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) milling machine with router bit cutting the panels apart.
The person loading the magazines with the panels puts a clear laser-cut mylar solder stencil on top of the panel. The holes in the stencil are where the first machine shown will squeegee solder paste onto the board. The solder paste is a gray viscous carrier liquid with flux-like properties and near microscopic beads of solder in suspension.
The after automated camera inspection of the solder paste process, panel experiences a machine is called a “pick-and-place” robot. It picks up the surface mount parts from parts trays received from the parts manufacturers and places them on the circuit board panels. The viscous solder paste holds the parts in place, even if there are parts on both sides of the board. That’s how double sided surface mount circuit boards are made; and you were wondering why the parts on the bottom don’t fall off ;-)
The parts are soldered to the panel in a linear reflow oven. As the board travels down the oven it gets hot enough for the solder paste to melt or “reflow”, thereby soldering the surface mount parts to the board. The temperature “profile” the board sees during the reflow process is carefully controlled per component manufacturer specifications. A micro-controller not only controls the temperature at any point along the oven, but the speed at which the board travels through the oven is also carefully controlled to match the temperature profile.
These USB stick boards look quite simple; single-sided even. More sophisticated surface mount boards often go through this pick-place and reflow process several times because different parts require different temperature profiles during the reflow process. Sometimes, in the last step delicate components actually get soldered on to the board by hand. The rest of the manufacturing process in the video is pretty clear.
Things that I found interesting: It looks like they do 100% testing, not statistical sampling, and twice – not just once! That seems wasteful to me. They have human slaves sticking the labels on by hand! Can you imagine doing that job? Truly a departure from all the other steps, which are automated. Almost all of the machines shown in the video are made in the U.S.A. The CyberOptics solder paste and post-reflow camera inspectors are quite sophisticated; smarter than me actually. They’re self taught.