W1zzard
03-06-2005, 02:28 PM
[page=Introduction]
Sapphire Corporate History
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/sapphire.jpg
Sapphire Technology Ltd. was founded as private company in June 2001 by KD Au, first as video card reselling company for the European Market.
Over 3000 People are involved in the production of a video card from Sapphire, which is the biggest manufacturer and seller of ATI Video Cards with a capacity of up to 1.8 million units per month.
The ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factory has always been the major manufacturer of ATI boards for most of the top ten tier 1 OEMs worldwide. With this background, the customers are guaranteed the best product quality and reliability.
The Factory
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/map.jpg
Sapphire's Factory is located in China, near the city of Dongguan. The distance to Hong Kong, where the corporate headquarters are, is about 100 km.
Dongguan, located between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, is the Chinese Mainland's leading centre for export processing in labour-intensive, light manufacturing industries.
In 2002, Dongguan was the Chinese Mainland's third leading exporting city ($44 billion trade in 2002) behind Shenzhen and Shanghai. Foreign investment has been an important driver of Dongguan's development, with the vast majority of Dongguan's industrial output supplied by foreign-invested firms. Dongguan factories produce an enormous range of goods and have made Dongguan one of the world's leading manufacturing centres.
The Factory has an area of about 250,000 m² which is used by 16 completely independant production lines. At the time of our visit additional lines were under construction to satisfy the increased demand from the market.
[page=Component Placement]
Component placement
The life of a video card starts with the empty PCB (printed circuit board). Sapphire does not manufacture these themselves, they are bought from an external contractor.
Next comes placement of the SMD (surface mount device) components. This is performed by a completely automated FUJI CP-732E placement machine, which takes the PCB design as input and places components from a selection of up to 140 different parts onto the PCB - at an amazing rate of 15 parts per second!
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement2.jpg
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/cp-732-head.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement3.jpg
An X800 video card has about 850 components, so the first run, which is one side only takes about 1 minute. Now multiply that by two, because two cards are built together at the same time as you can see from the following pictures:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/twocards.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/twocards2.jpg
Two PCBs are joined together at the socket connector and will be cut into two video cards later during the production process.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement4.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement5.jpg
[page=Soldering]
Soldering
Soldering is performed by a Vitronics Soltec XPM 820 using the reflow soldering method, which is the method of choice when connecting surface mount devices (SMDs) to printed circuit boards.
Reflow soldering is a relatively simple process. Solder in the form of paste is heated in contact with components and the PCB. Depending on the alloy, the solder paste particles become liquid at around 180ºC. In the case of lead-free paste the temperature will be higher depending on the alloy selected, but typically about 235ºC. When the solder is liquid, a joint will form between the two surfaces.
Nitrogen is used in reflow soldering to drive out the oxygen from the soldering chamber. This prevents the solder pads and component terminals to oxidise during reflow of the solder paste. The visual appearance of the solder joint surface will be smoother and in some cases shinier.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/soldering3.jpg
[pagE=Manual Work]
Manual Work
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/cutting.jpg
The first manual production step is to cut the big PCB into two video cards.
After that, large through-hole-components are placed and soldered on the video card.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/rework.jpg
Manual solder rework of the video cards is the last soldering step, if needed.
Sometimes during the lifespan of a video card product, a problem comes up or there is a recommendation from ATI for an added/replaced/removed component. During the time until the schematics are updated and the machines are set up, the changes are performed manually here, so that the production line does not have to be idle.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/serial.jpg
The final "production" step is putting the serial number sticker on the video card.
At the moment considerable work is going into a system which allows complete tracking of the sales, shipping, packaging and production history of every single Sapphire video card from the end-user, back to the individual production line.
[page=Quality Control]
Quality control
Now that the video card is finished, it is thoroughly tested.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing2.jpg
Every single produced card is run through several manual and several automated tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing3.jpg
Here you can see a 3DMark2003 test on the second screen from left and on the other ones some Windows 2D tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/heating.jpg
To make sure, that the card will also work in cases where air flow is not as good or in high-temperature countries, the card is heated by a heater blower while it is running some tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system2.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system3.jpg
What I found very interesting to see, is that every card is tested in a real motherboard with a real AGP/PCI-E slot.
This is the ultimate proof that even brand-new, never opened cards can, and most probably will have small scratches on their socket connectors.
Many users have asked on forums "My new video card has scratches on the connector, did they send me a refurbished one?" - Most probably no. Scratches on the connector are no reliable indicator if a video card has been used by another user before. What you should look for is dust around the cooler which builds up after some use.
[pagE=Packaging]
Packaging
What we show here, is how the bulk cards are packaged. At the time of our visit there was no Retail packaging going on.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging1.jpg
Twenty video cards are packaged safely into a box.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging2.jpg
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging3.jpg
Individual lots are formed, based on customer orders or final destination.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/storage.jpg
This building in Hong Kong contains Sapphire's storage for the China Area.
[page=Testing]
Testing
For certain video card models, ATI gives permission to the AIBs (Add-in-Board-Manufacturers) to change the ATI reference design.
Common changes are changes in the output configuration like dual-DVI, changed memory, for example slower (= cheaper) or faster memory.
Since AIBs are always trying to cut costs, the most important change is reducing the number of PCB layers. The more layers a PCB has, the more expensive it is to make. So reducing the layer count of a video card from eight to six considerably drops cost, which allows more competitive prices.
Above changes considerably effect the general product quality as well as the stability. To make sure new designs show excellent performance, they are tested extensively.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/acceleratedlife.jpg
Obviously it is not possible to test a new design for extended periods of time, so some tricks are used. The temperature and humidity is increased in a special test environment while the card is running 3DMark in a loop.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/5yearaccelerated.jpg
This test setup runs the card through five years of use. It does this by increasing the ambient temperature to 90°C while the card is powered on for about 14 days, which results in a speedup of 131x real time.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/lowtemp.jpg
Not only high temperatures make life of a video card difficult, also low temperatures add strain to the compoents. This chamber cools the video card down to -5°C to +5°C. Now the video card is powered on and off over 200 times.
Mmm frozen video card, too bad that they wouldn't let me try overclocking in there.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/environmental.jpg
The next environmental test simulates extreme changes in temperature and humidity. In that case from 55°C with 90% humidity to 0°C with 0% humidity. Test duration is 48 hours during which 3DMark is continually running with system reboots in between.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/thermalshock.jpg
The last thermal test is the "Thermal Shock Test" which simulates repeated extreme temperature changes in a very short time.
Any material expands and contracts a little bit depending on temperature (the mercury thermometer is a real world application of that). Since the video card is made up from different materials, the expansion rate and amount is different, this puts mechanical stress on the solder joints and the components.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/contact.jpg
The contact tester is used to check if all connection on the PCB are right. A PCB is put into the device which measures resistance, impedance and can check for continuity and shorts.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/xray.jpg
This X-Ray inspection system allows to check that the individual layers of a PCB are properly aligned. It is also possible to check the quality of solder joints and search for bad BGA solder balls.
How possible defects look like:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/xray1.jpg
BGA is the ball grid array attachment method used on ATI's GPU Cores. On the bottom of each GPU, there are hundreds of tiny solder balls (the R480 for example has 1345) which melt and form contact with the PCB. If the solder connection of only one of these balls is bad, the whole card will not work, so it is very important to rule out possible problems as early in the production process as possible.
[hr]
This concludes our tour through Sapphire's factory. I hope you enjoyed it and got a little bit of an idea how complex building a video card is.
Also I hope you noticed, that the factory is not 100% robot automated, many tasks are performed by humans. While low wages are certainly a reason for that, another important reason is that there are so many different video card products and the production lines produce different cards almost daily. Automated machines are best at constantly building the same product over and over, humans are much more flexible.
Finally, I would like to thank everybody at Sapphire who made this article possible.
Sapphire Corporate History
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/sapphire.jpg
Sapphire Technology Ltd. was founded as private company in June 2001 by KD Au, first as video card reselling company for the European Market.
Over 3000 People are involved in the production of a video card from Sapphire, which is the biggest manufacturer and seller of ATI Video Cards with a capacity of up to 1.8 million units per month.
The ISO9001 and ISO14001 certified factory has always been the major manufacturer of ATI boards for most of the top ten tier 1 OEMs worldwide. With this background, the customers are guaranteed the best product quality and reliability.
The Factory
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/map.jpg
Sapphire's Factory is located in China, near the city of Dongguan. The distance to Hong Kong, where the corporate headquarters are, is about 100 km.
Dongguan, located between Guangzhou and Shenzhen, is the Chinese Mainland's leading centre for export processing in labour-intensive, light manufacturing industries.
In 2002, Dongguan was the Chinese Mainland's third leading exporting city ($44 billion trade in 2002) behind Shenzhen and Shanghai. Foreign investment has been an important driver of Dongguan's development, with the vast majority of Dongguan's industrial output supplied by foreign-invested firms. Dongguan factories produce an enormous range of goods and have made Dongguan one of the world's leading manufacturing centres.
The Factory has an area of about 250,000 m² which is used by 16 completely independant production lines. At the time of our visit additional lines were under construction to satisfy the increased demand from the market.
[page=Component Placement]
Component placement
The life of a video card starts with the empty PCB (printed circuit board). Sapphire does not manufacture these themselves, they are bought from an external contractor.
Next comes placement of the SMD (surface mount device) components. This is performed by a completely automated FUJI CP-732E placement machine, which takes the PCB design as input and places components from a selection of up to 140 different parts onto the PCB - at an amazing rate of 15 parts per second!
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement2.jpg
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/cp-732-head.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement3.jpg
An X800 video card has about 850 components, so the first run, which is one side only takes about 1 minute. Now multiply that by two, because two cards are built together at the same time as you can see from the following pictures:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/twocards.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/twocards2.jpg
Two PCBs are joined together at the socket connector and will be cut into two video cards later during the production process.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement4.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/placement5.jpg
[page=Soldering]
Soldering
Soldering is performed by a Vitronics Soltec XPM 820 using the reflow soldering method, which is the method of choice when connecting surface mount devices (SMDs) to printed circuit boards.
Reflow soldering is a relatively simple process. Solder in the form of paste is heated in contact with components and the PCB. Depending on the alloy, the solder paste particles become liquid at around 180ºC. In the case of lead-free paste the temperature will be higher depending on the alloy selected, but typically about 235ºC. When the solder is liquid, a joint will form between the two surfaces.
Nitrogen is used in reflow soldering to drive out the oxygen from the soldering chamber. This prevents the solder pads and component terminals to oxidise during reflow of the solder paste. The visual appearance of the solder joint surface will be smoother and in some cases shinier.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/soldering3.jpg
[pagE=Manual Work]
Manual Work
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/cutting.jpg
The first manual production step is to cut the big PCB into two video cards.
After that, large through-hole-components are placed and soldered on the video card.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/rework.jpg
Manual solder rework of the video cards is the last soldering step, if needed.
Sometimes during the lifespan of a video card product, a problem comes up or there is a recommendation from ATI for an added/replaced/removed component. During the time until the schematics are updated and the machines are set up, the changes are performed manually here, so that the production line does not have to be idle.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/serial.jpg
The final "production" step is putting the serial number sticker on the video card.
At the moment considerable work is going into a system which allows complete tracking of the sales, shipping, packaging and production history of every single Sapphire video card from the end-user, back to the individual production line.
[page=Quality Control]
Quality control
Now that the video card is finished, it is thoroughly tested.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing2.jpg
Every single produced card is run through several manual and several automated tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/testing3.jpg
Here you can see a 3DMark2003 test on the second screen from left and on the other ones some Windows 2D tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/heating.jpg
To make sure, that the card will also work in cases where air flow is not as good or in high-temperature countries, the card is heated by a heater blower while it is running some tests.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system1.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system2.jpg http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/in-system3.jpg
What I found very interesting to see, is that every card is tested in a real motherboard with a real AGP/PCI-E slot.
This is the ultimate proof that even brand-new, never opened cards can, and most probably will have small scratches on their socket connectors.
Many users have asked on forums "My new video card has scratches on the connector, did they send me a refurbished one?" - Most probably no. Scratches on the connector are no reliable indicator if a video card has been used by another user before. What you should look for is dust around the cooler which builds up after some use.
[pagE=Packaging]
Packaging
What we show here, is how the bulk cards are packaged. At the time of our visit there was no Retail packaging going on.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging1.jpg
Twenty video cards are packaged safely into a box.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging2.jpg
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/packaging3.jpg
Individual lots are formed, based on customer orders or final destination.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/storage.jpg
This building in Hong Kong contains Sapphire's storage for the China Area.
[page=Testing]
Testing
For certain video card models, ATI gives permission to the AIBs (Add-in-Board-Manufacturers) to change the ATI reference design.
Common changes are changes in the output configuration like dual-DVI, changed memory, for example slower (= cheaper) or faster memory.
Since AIBs are always trying to cut costs, the most important change is reducing the number of PCB layers. The more layers a PCB has, the more expensive it is to make. So reducing the layer count of a video card from eight to six considerably drops cost, which allows more competitive prices.
Above changes considerably effect the general product quality as well as the stability. To make sure new designs show excellent performance, they are tested extensively.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/acceleratedlife.jpg
Obviously it is not possible to test a new design for extended periods of time, so some tricks are used. The temperature and humidity is increased in a special test environment while the card is running 3DMark in a loop.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/5yearaccelerated.jpg
This test setup runs the card through five years of use. It does this by increasing the ambient temperature to 90°C while the card is powered on for about 14 days, which results in a speedup of 131x real time.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/lowtemp.jpg
Not only high temperatures make life of a video card difficult, also low temperatures add strain to the compoents. This chamber cools the video card down to -5°C to +5°C. Now the video card is powered on and off over 200 times.
Mmm frozen video card, too bad that they wouldn't let me try overclocking in there.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/environmental.jpg
The next environmental test simulates extreme changes in temperature and humidity. In that case from 55°C with 90% humidity to 0°C with 0% humidity. Test duration is 48 hours during which 3DMark is continually running with system reboots in between.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/thermalshock.jpg
The last thermal test is the "Thermal Shock Test" which simulates repeated extreme temperature changes in a very short time.
Any material expands and contracts a little bit depending on temperature (the mercury thermometer is a real world application of that). Since the video card is made up from different materials, the expansion rate and amount is different, this puts mechanical stress on the solder joints and the components.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/contact.jpg
The contact tester is used to check if all connection on the PCB are right. A PCB is put into the device which measures resistance, impedance and can check for continuity and shorts.
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/xray.jpg
This X-Ray inspection system allows to check that the individual layers of a PCB are properly aligned. It is also possible to check the quality of solder joints and search for bad BGA solder balls.
How possible defects look like:
http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Sapphire/Factory/images/xray1.jpg
BGA is the ball grid array attachment method used on ATI's GPU Cores. On the bottom of each GPU, there are hundreds of tiny solder balls (the R480 for example has 1345) which melt and form contact with the PCB. If the solder connection of only one of these balls is bad, the whole card will not work, so it is very important to rule out possible problems as early in the production process as possible.
[hr]
This concludes our tour through Sapphire's factory. I hope you enjoyed it and got a little bit of an idea how complex building a video card is.
Also I hope you noticed, that the factory is not 100% robot automated, many tasks are performed by humans. While low wages are certainly a reason for that, another important reason is that there are so many different video card products and the production lines produce different cards almost daily. Automated machines are best at constantly building the same product over and over, humans are much more flexible.
Finally, I would like to thank everybody at Sapphire who made this article possible.