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That's supported by the observation in the article that companies are not investing much capital in improving productivity. If you've ever seen video of a Foxc

by jordanb 11y ago

That's supported by the observation in the article that companies are not investing much capital in improving productivity. If you've ever seen video of a Foxconn factory you've seen the rows of people carefully placing ICs onto circuit boards. In fact, there are machines to do that. They're called pick and place machines[0]. They've existed for many years. But labor in China is cheap enough that it often makes more sense to pay humans to do it manually than to invest in automation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_placement_equipment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_placement_equipment

SixSigma 11y ago
Plus you can scale labour up or down whereas you can usually only scale machines up without significant loss.
eitally 11y ago
I'm not 100% certain but I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. There are several types of components that require surface mounting on PCBs. By far the most common are things like resistors & capacitors that are machine placeable. But others, like BGAs and through-hole components, often require hand placement because they require hand soldering and can't go through a wave solder machine. Additional possible complications are boards with components placed on both sides, or multi-layer boards with non-standard solder. Finally, Debug/Repair stations are always manual. Source: Masters in operations research and 15 years experience writing factory control software for one of Foxconn's direct competitors & largest trading partners.
- Retric 11y ago
  Generally, increasing automation requires some design changes, but you can start with the same basic design and end up with one focused on automation and another optimized for human asembly. So, it's a little more nuanced than you are suggesting. PS: There are also at least demos of pick and place for through-hole components. But, I don't know how production ready they are. (Manufacturing PCBs is not my area.)
  - the-dude 11y ago
    TH pick & place is very old, like 30-40 years. Very common too, the PCBs were designed for it ( enough clearance ).
- mrob 11y ago
  BGAs are nearly impossible to hand solder. You can theoretically do it by flipping them upside down and soldering individual wires to each ball, but this is very difficult, unreliable, and harms signal integrity. It's completely unsuitable for production and even for prototyping it's basically never done. Through hole components are commonly hand placed or hand soldered because there are only a few on the board, not enough to make machine placement/wave soldering cost effective. Additionally, some through hole components have shapes that make machine placement difficult.
  - quietplatypus 11y ago
    Yeah that comment jumped out at me as sketchy the second I saw that... "15 years" in operations and isn't even aware of this basic fact.
pjc50 11y ago
That's a terrible example, not just because of technical inaccuracy because China is one of the few places in the world making vast capital investments - not just in production, but real estate, transport, power generation etc. (Sibling comment is correct that SMT automated assembly is used for most parts, and a few large TH parts like connectors are soldered on at the end. Wire bondout of chips into chip packages and things like SD cards and USB sticks however seems to be more manual.)

by jordanb 11y ago

SixSigma 11y ago

Plus you can scale labour up or down whereas you can usually only scale machines up without significant loss.

eitally 11y ago

I'm not 100% certain but I'm pretty sure you don't know what you're talking about. There are several types of components that require surface mounting on PCBs. By far the most common are things like resistors & capacitors that are machine placeable. But others, like BGAs and through-hole components, often require hand placement because they require hand soldering and can't go through a wave solder machine. Additional possible complications are boards with components placed on both sides, or multi-layer boards with non-standard solder. Finally, Debug/Repair stations are always manual. Source: Masters in operations research and 15 years experience writing factory control software for one of Foxconn's direct competitors & largest trading partners.

Retric 11y ago
Generally, increasing automation requires some design changes, but you can start with the same basic design and end up with one focused on automation and another optimized for human asembly. So, it's a little more nuanced than you are suggesting. PS: There are also at least demos of pick and place for through-hole components. But, I don't know how production ready they are. (Manufacturing PCBs is not my area.)
- the-dude 11y ago
  TH pick & place is very old, like 30-40 years. Very common too, the PCBs were designed for it ( enough clearance ).
mrob 11y ago
BGAs are nearly impossible to hand solder. You can theoretically do it by flipping them upside down and soldering individual wires to each ball, but this is very difficult, unreliable, and harms signal integrity. It's completely unsuitable for production and even for prototyping it's basically never done. Through hole components are commonly hand placed or hand soldered because there are only a few on the board, not enough to make machine placement/wave soldering cost effective. Additionally, some through hole components have shapes that make machine placement difficult.
- quietplatypus 11y ago
  Yeah that comment jumped out at me as sketchy the second I saw that... "15 years" in operations and isn't even aware of this basic fact.

pjc50 11y ago

That's a terrible example, not just because of technical inaccuracy because China is one of the few places in the world making vast capital investments - not just in production, but real estate, transport, power generation etc. (Sibling comment is correct that SMT automated assembly is used for most parts, and a few large TH parts like connectors are soldered on at the end. Wire bondout of chips into chip packages and things like SD cards and USB sticks however seems to be more manual.)