The Nan-Ping factory is about an hour out from Taipei City where Computex was happening in full swing; it's one of four manufacturing plants that Gigabyte owns. The second is located in Ping-Jen in Taiwan and the remaining two factories are in China: Ning-Bo (just south of Shanghai) and Dong-Guan further south still. Nan-Ping isn't your typical expansive factory – it's almost as tall as it is wide, with eight huge floors offering 45,000 square metres of space for 1,200 employees.


The factory features eleven SMT lines (seventh Floor) providing 400,000 motherboards, 300,000 graphics cards and 5,000 server products a month. There are also six lines of DIP and Testing (fourth and fifth floors) and four lines of packing all those motherboard, VGA and server products up on the second floor.

There are also two lines of whole system assembly for its OEM and retail business on the third floor and two lines for its mobile assembly unit (20,000 units per month) for Asia on the sixth floor. The factory also has attained five ISO standards and it is 14,000 and 9,001, OHSAS 18001, IECQ QC 080000 and TL 9000 certified.

Manufacturing starts out in the SMT area, where the PCBs Gigabyte originally outsources are subjected to X-ray checking and internal QC before being solder pasted up and then wheeled down to initial high speed component placement. This is where all the little surface mount parts like resistors and ceramic capacitors get fired into place by a multi-headed gun that looks at the board layout and puts the piece into place. The camera is tailored to Gigabyte's blue PCB dye so it works particularly fast because usually these cameras work best with traditional green or yellow coloured PCBs.

You can read the entire article at Bit-Tech.