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Technology

Take a Peek Inside the Dane-Elec Memory Plant 107

Posted by chrisd from the ooo-pretty-assembling-machines dept.
Megamuch writes: "The tweakers.net guys got to take a tour inside the Dane-Elec memory factory in Ireland and have posted a pictorial tour of their trip. " They give a nice tour with lots of decent photos of the process that the comany goes through to package up chips. Fascinating stuff.
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Take a Peek Inside the Dane-Elec Memory Plant More

Take a Peek Inside the Dane-Elec Memory Plant

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  • Really cheap, too (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is cool. I was trying to decide between getting some really, really cheap CAS 2 DDR by Dane-Elec, or some CAS 2.5 from Kingston. I'd never heard of Dane-Elec, but newegg sells their stuff.
    The Dane-Elec "DDR 512MB" CAS 2 seems to be the best deal I've seen anywhere: $102.00.
    Now I can get it without worrying who this "no name" company is ;)

  • They had one [tweakers.net] at the local Pizza Hut!

    I love how space age technologies trickly down into everyday use.
  • HardOCP had a illustrated trip of the ABit factory [hardocp.com] a few years ago, and while they had a lot of surface mount technology that was automated, things like PCI sockets were installed by HAND [hardocp.com]. While the cool automated, dust-free machines are good for some things, a lot of the components we use are cheaper to assemble with manpower.
    • a lot of the components we use are cheaper to assemble with manpower.

      Or more specifically from what I've seen, asian womanpower. They're damn good with their hands. Even at the York (heating/air conditioning manf) company there were only asian women handling the delicate stuff like wiring up switchboxes.
    • things like PCI sockets were installed by HAND.

      Automated placement of large through-hole parts is generally not feasible because:
      • due to the size of these parts, they can't be handled efficiently by machines. It would take tons of packing material to put them in reels, and the placement arm would need a very large gripper in order to pick them up. Humans do quite well at pulling them out of a big bucket.
      • if the part has lots of pins, it's difficult for the machine to aling. These parts are often shipped in bags, and many of them will have bent pins. People are pretty good at fixing those one the spot...
      • there are usually very few such parts on a board, so its not even worth optimizing it if you could. You might have a couple PCI slots, a transformer, and giant cap, etc. It's not like inserting hundreds of little resitors by hand...


      Even some surface mount parts are installed by hand - you'd be amazed. Any kind of custom connector or non-standard package is probably installed by hand, even for volume production. SO-DIMM sockets, for example, are installed by hand - they have little plastic guide pins to align them.
  • from the article:

    Old 486 machines, laptops and dual CPU servers are sometimes running Quake III for days and days. All this to be sure that things don't crash due to a faulty memory module.

    Do they have job openings? :^p
  • pictorial tour of thier trip

  • Also ... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Niadh ( 468443 )
    They got the whole factory to run off peat! Very good for the environment; not to mention the last sunday of each month when they burn the âoespecial mossâ and get the bulk of England high.

    • Re:Also ... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They're in the Republic of Ireland. Not England - the Dan-Elec plant is in Galway, Ireland - hundreds of miles away from England, in a (very) different country, on a different island.

      It can be akin to calling Cuba the "U.S.A." or Israel "Saudi Arabia" in terms of social faux pas...
  • Is it just me or did anyone else read Dane-Elec as Dan Electro [danelectro.com]?

    T

  • Ah, finally.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Idaho ( 12907 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @04:01AM (#3658274)
    Ah, finally a site that will be pretty hard to bring down using the SlashDot effect :)

    tweakers.net routinely handles about one million hits a day, go check their Statistics [tweakers.net] page, or check out some pictures [tweakers.net] of their servers and server room.

    Ofcourse the text is in Dutch, but I think you can read stats and view pictures in Dutch right :)

    • woah, if you look at the pictures, and try to make sense of the text...'TrueServer heeft een gigabit lijntje met de AMS-IX en 100Mbit transit uplinks met Level3, Ebone, Telia en AboveNet.' - are they using a Juniper M20 to route 3 100meg uplinks into a gig patch to their switch? Isn't that just a teensy bit excessive?
      • "TrueServer has a gigabit line to the AMS-IX and a 100MBit transit uplink with Level3, Ebone, Telia and AboveNet"

        TrueServer is where they have their servers co-located. I think tweakers.net itself is 'just' on a 100Mbit link.
      • The sentence translates into "TrueServer (the hosting company) has a Gigabit connection to AMS-IX (Amsterdam Internet Exchange) and 100 MBit transit uplinks to Level3, EBone, Telia and AboveNet'.

        The sentence below that (about the Juniper router) translates into this:

        "Not many Dutch hosting farms can match such network connectivity. The TrueServer network runs on Juniper M20 routers and core-switches from Extreme Networks"

        So it's not exactly what you thought it meant - it's more like, they have a veeeeeeeeeeeeeery large bandwidth, with several upstream providers (so if, for example, KPNQwest files for chapter 11 - which they did in case you don't know - they don't have any problem at all :)

    • Re:Ah, finally.... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Femme Taken ( 121397 )
      Actually we do about 1.3 to 1.4 million pageviews and more than 25 million hits per day. That's around 20 to 25 pageviews per second during working hours. Slashdot traffic adds up 2,5 p/s - not really noticeable. Fortunately we have plenty of headroom and no stability and performance problems with the database servers like we had before (MySQL 3.23.49-innodb is rock solid).
  • aren't there a lot of hard drive and ram companies in ireland and the surrounding area? just wondering why that is, considering manufacturing seems to be about a billion time cheaper in asia.
    • Being blunt, it's because we're cheaper too.
      The argument for keeping the work from going to
      Asia is that for R&D and smaller development the
      higer price point is worth it for higher standards
      and the ease of communication afforded by working
      with people whose native language is English.
      Don't read any bias into the above comments, it's
      what I'm told from working in the IT industry,
      and yes, I've seen projects go to Wipro and
      similar places.

      (I'm a software engineer for a Canadian company
      and my housemate works for a memory/disk
      manufacturer. Location: Northern Ireland)
    • The Irish government has been making it very cost-friendly to build plants there. Additionally, they have a great deal of fresh water available -- which is one of the lifelines of a semiconductor plant (the water is processed to be de-ionized for use in numerous things - cleaning, processing, and reducing that 80 molar HF to something more usable - like 8 molar HF -- fun stuff. Don't spill it on you).

      You also need a fairly well educated populace for a fab -- if you just take people with grade school educations they aren't likely to follow the very strict guidelines on cleanliness, dresscode, and operational procedures because they just don't understand what they're working with, and how easily it is to destroy. One worker can singlehandedly destroy several million dollars in production in a single day. So most fabs want educated workers (I dunno that this is necessarily a plus or minus for Ireland over SE Asia, just something to consider).

      Finally, one huge plus for Ireland over SE Asia is language. Most (all?) Irish speak English, so when a manager from the US comes over they can ask a worker and not have to go through translation (well... ok... depends on how heavy an accent, but I bet you'll have more success than you would in SE Asia).
    • In a nutshell:

      * Inside EU zone
      * Insize Euro currency zone
      * Natives speak English as first language
      * Good coroporate tax rates (10%)
      * Wages less than US and some parts of EU (althogh
      they are rising)
      * Time zone difference to US less than that of rest
      of Europe
      * Education system is well respected.
      * Guinness :-)

  • Not that exciting.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by seanadams.com ( 463190 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @04:12AM (#3658305) Homepage
    This isn't a chip fab - they're just stuffing boards... still, nice photos of the whole process. I had a chance to see a shop like this in person, and took a bunch of photos [slimdevices.com] and even some video (536K MPEG) [slimdevices.com] of the process. The machines are quite mesmerizing (sp?) to watch, and it's amazing the amount of human and automated quality control that goes into manufacturing this stuff.
    • The machines are very fun to watch...ok, maybe not for non-geeks. But when I worked at a company that did electronics manufacturing, it always liked watching the surface-mount machines stick the components on. Oh, and the wave solder machines are really fun. Watching a wave of molten solder welling up is something to behold...
  • I know this is grandly off-topic, but how do they manage to take an areal photograph, with the mirrored image being an office, including office-chairs and a person sitting in one?

    If you don't see it, look closer, you'll see what I mean,- the chairs are red.

    Now, I've been in quite a few business jets, actually, but I've never seen one with chairs like that. ;)

  • Man!!!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This artical is funny I worked for IBM in the DRAM final Test and we had 40 2.5 million dollar Teradyne Testers to test the chips and this company uses old 486s and Computers running Quake 3. No wonder why we at IBM got out of DRAM.

    • Re:Man!!!! (Score:3, Informative)

      by HardCase ( 14757 )
      This artical is funny I worked for IBM in the DRAM final Test and we had 40 2.5 million dollar Teradyne Testers to test the chips and this company uses old 486s and Computers running Quake 3. No wonder why we at IBM got out of DRAM.


      Did they fire you for being an id10t? IBM used Teradyne testers [teradyne.com] to test the DRAM because they were manufacturing chips not modules. Besides, the Teradynes have a very high throughput and allow a great deal of control over the testing environment. Somehow I don't think that throwing a module into a computer and running Quake 3 for a while gives much of an opportunity for quantity or quality of testing.


      -h-

  • A while ago slashdot posted a story on how intel chips are made, and the thing which really pissed me off about that article was no one seemed interested in actually going out to the factory and seeing how they are made. It was just ten or so pages of some dude talking to designers or management. I think I said "it was a bit like asking how shoes are made and just interviewing the guy how designed nike's gel shoe lace grip".

    Now, Im not dissing slashdot for posting the earlier article, Im just saying that some times it can be very interesting to go out and have a look around these places to see just how such and such corp make somthing, ie, big machines going real fast, really demonstrate how capitalism works.

    You can palm me off as just being some loser but IMHO it is the coalface of our society more then wall sheet or some building full of office clerks. And should be given as much consideration as say rumours of Apple buying SGI or whatever.

    So, way to go slashdot, Perhaps you could post a few more articles like this in the future when news is slow. Almost as fun as reading howstuffworks.com.

  • "To test modules for which they do not have automatic equipment, or to test compatibility, they use a whole series of different computers. Old 486 machines, laptops and dual CPU servers are sometimes running Quake III for days and days. All this to be sure that things don't crash due to a faulty memory module."

    lol, I wanna see Q3a on a 486 DX/4 120 with 128MB EDO and a GeForce 4MX PCI! considering Q1 was running at 5fps on a DX/2 66 with a 1MB orchid VLB card...
    • EDO was mostly around during late pentium days, I'd be very surprised if any 486 motherboard supported it. Also, there were hardly any 486 boards with PCI, nearly all were pure ISA or VLB/ISA.

      I also never saw a 486 motherboard capable of supporting 128 megs of ram, though some specialized server chipsets may be able to.

  • ARticle (Score:3, Informative)

    by mindstrm ( 20013 ) on Friday June 07, 2002 @10:46AM (#3659507)
    mentions how "Overclockers think your chips can get hurt at 100 degrees, but in this plant, they heat them to several times that"

    Yeah. And overclockers re right.

    A solder oven heats the board assembly slowly and uniformly.

    It's large thermal gradiants that kill chips... differnet parts of the chip at different temperatures introduce evil physical stresses that mess up the guts.

    Just like putting a person in hot water.. I believe tests have shown that humans can endure some crazy hot temperatures if they are heated slowly.

    • offtopic

      I believe it were frogs that were tested , when heating the water slowly they boiled alive and when they were put in hot water they jumped out.
  • No one else seems to have menioned this, but I can't view the site with Netscape (4.79, 1024x768). It's slapping the photos right over the text, not exactly browser friendly. I guss I could run IE, but then the terrorists win.
  • The article indicated that they don't test 100% of the completed modules. That's surprising. I'd expect at least a quick test that all the bits work and none of the lines are shorted or open.

    • Re:Not 100% tested? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by M-G ( 44998 )
      I suspect when they say "tested" in the article, they mean those are subject to long term testing. Usually every device that comes off the line in a place like this is popped on a testing jig to be sure everything works, but only a small sample is hooked up in a lab for extensive tests.

      The quick test tells you if the board stuffing is working correctly (and you want to know this quickly to prevent further waste), and the longer test looks for hidden defects in a statistical sample.
  • That looks alot like my memory plant in my garage! Only I dont see a "Crucial Memory" sticker making machine and any "Made in Mexico" stamps...wtf?

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