The Tour Begins
Below is our fearless leader, in the official factory wear of Abit.
Not the most flattering image ever, is it? Well, into the tour we will dive…
This image is the first sight we saw going into the Abit/Rolly Technologies building, including a stack of unused PCB boards on the right hand side. The various machines you are seeing make up the SMT lines that produce the motherboards step-by-step.
This is in the initial step for the motherboard process — all automated PCB feeding machine that can be modified to fit and PCB board including motherboards and graphics cards.
Here is what PCB board looks like before it starts production; just blank PCB with white coloring where the ICs and components will eventually be placed.
This machine is the solder printer that places the traces on the motherboard that allow for communications between the various ICs on the motherboard.
Here we can see the IC installation machine. This picture does not do it justice, as the machine works very quickly to install the chips on the motherboard including the north and south bridge, sound chips and more.
Here is a shot of the MOSFET installation machine, which runs significantly slower than the IC machine, as they are more sensitive device.
These are rolls of MOSFETs — kind of like a roll of stickers that the machine takes the components from before ‘sticking’ them to the motherboard.
This is the motherboards PCB after IC and MOSFET installation. Notice that there is still a lot to do at this point, as we have no AGP or PCI slots among other items that we need for a motherboard to function.