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Question for people in the tech factory industry: who has the coolest factories? I love the Intel museum at their campus, but have never been inside a Fab or e

by breck 6y ago

Question for people in the tech factory industry: who has the coolest factories? I love the Intel museum at their campus, but have never been inside a Fab or even a computer assembly factory (or automotive factory, etc). Closest I've come is the place where they make all the Cape Cod Potato chips. If you were to put together a world "most advanced factories" sightseeing tour, what would be on the list?

baybal2 6y ago
Most advanced does not necessarily mean most big. I myself only saw Chinese manufacturing, and to lesser extend Vietnamese (which is mostly run by Chinese, and Japanese anyways.) The PCB stages were fully automated for decades, and even very small shops may have zero manual population. PCB shops look more or less the same anywhere in the world. Most interesting things come after that. "Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly. Automation has economic advantage in very narrow sets of circumstances. Though the variance in non-automated assembly lines can be giant. You can easily spend 10 times to assemble a widget with same amount of people, and equipment by getting the process management wrong.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  >"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly. Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops. You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!
  - baybal2 6y ago
    For metal fabrication, yes. CNC mills do make quite a lot of commercial sense for even low volume fabrications. But we here talk about electronics manufacturing, not metalworking.
    - reportingsjr 6y ago
      I mean, even in electronics manufacturing the level of automation and robotics has drastically increased. Pick and place machines for the low end are cheap and ubiquitous these days. Go look up videos of battery factories and look at the level of robotics they have involved. It's incredible!
      - baybal2 6y ago
        Automatic board population has been the case for decades, yet electronics factories are for larger part non-automated past that. Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.
  - tape_measure 6y ago
    On HN, we are supposed to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment. CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low. GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.
  - axaxs 6y ago
    That's a little unfair. CNC are a type of machine that do something every machine shop would need to do. Manufacturing and assembly typically require very specific automation that would be useless to anything else...hence why it only makes sense with volume.
antoniuschan99 6y ago
Strange parts has some cool inside look at the popular pcb manufacturing fabs such as pcbway and jlcpcb https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s
- breck 6y ago
  Wow, this is awesome! Thank you!

by breck 6y ago

baybal2 6y ago

Most advanced does not necessarily mean most big. I myself only saw Chinese manufacturing, and to lesser extend Vietnamese (which is mostly run by Chinese, and Japanese anyways.) The PCB stages were fully automated for decades, and even very small shops may have zero manual population. PCB shops look more or less the same anywhere in the world. Most interesting things come after that. "Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly. Automation has economic advantage in very narrow sets of circumstances. Though the variance in non-automated assembly lines can be giant. You can easily spend 10 times to assemble a widget with same amount of people, and equipment by getting the process management wrong.

reportingsjr 6y ago
>"Robots" are very easily beaten on cost by manual labour unless there is crazy commitment to volumes, long production runs, and having robotisation done very thoroughly. Go find me a reasonably profitable machine shop that doesn't have mostly CNC machines. You won't find many. Even in places with low cost labor like China CNC machines are pretty ubiquitous outside of fairly specialty shops. You can look on YouTube and see tons of examples of factories that have a mixture of robotic automation and human labor. The production world has changed a ton in the last ten to fifteen years!
- baybal2 6y ago
  For metal fabrication, yes. CNC mills do make quite a lot of commercial sense for even low volume fabrications. But we here talk about electronics manufacturing, not metalworking.
  - reportingsjr 6y ago
    I mean, even in electronics manufacturing the level of automation and robotics has drastically increased. Pick and place machines for the low end are cheap and ubiquitous these days. Go look up videos of battery factories and look at the level of robotics they have involved. It's incredible!
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Automatic board population has been the case for decades, yet electronics factories are for larger part non-automated past that. Batteries are too a very easy to understand case for automation. You have to make a single widget without alterations by billions for year on end — exactly the case for maximum automation.
- tape_measure 6y ago
  On HN, we are supposed to respond to the strongest interpretation of a comment. CNC machines add capabilities that are not possible by hand. In these shops, you might see deburring done as an extension of the machine cycle where labor cost is high, but by hand where it is low. GP is right that automation is a huge commitment in design and manufacture. If there are any finicky parts, it's likely that humans will have to do or correct the robot's job, and now you have an idle robot and an engaged human.
- axaxs 6y ago
  That's a little unfair. CNC are a type of machine that do something every machine shop would need to do. Manufacturing and assembly typically require very specific automation that would be useless to anything else...hence why it only makes sense with volume.

antoniuschan99 6y ago

Strange parts has some cool inside look at the popular pcb manufacturing fabs such as pcbway and jlcpcb https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s https://youtu.be/ljOoGyCso8s

breck 6y ago
Wow, this is awesome! Thank you!