Hitting the Books and the Motherboards

Really not much to report on Tuesday, unless you are fascinated by people learning the basics of MATLAB and digital image processing. I will, of course, share some food pics! We ordered some take-out consisting of rice, your choice of meat (I had pork, Dilla had chicken), egg, vegetables, tofu and a piece of sausage all stuffed in a little wooden box and served with a very sweet yogurt drink who's name I forget (along with the names of all the other food I've tried). All for about $2.

Meal fit for a ...college student. Very yummy!

That's a pretty big piece of chicken for $2

I think Dilla brought one suitcase of snacks and one for everything else from Indonesia.

Otherwise, a lot of work on my part getting caught up enough so I can actually help the group.

The Group: Clockwise from the bottom: Dilla, Ji Shien, "Frank" and "Sun". "Jerry, another student in the lab, is in the background.

So, today (Wednesday), we took our first field trip to the Nan Ping Gigabyte plant and the UMC microchip foundry. On the way out, I wish I could have taken pictures of the many shop signs I saw, but that would have entailed me remembering to take my camera out of my bag.... I did however get a shot of a very common sight in this part of Taiwan, and that is the cart vendor. That is lunch and sometimes dinner for many people working in the area.

The difference between here and the US is that this food is probably good...

At the Gigabyte plant, we got to spend time in the lobby looking at their display of old motherboards. Laugh if you will, but we were all geeking out and taking pictures of ancient boards on display.

The GA-386SX! 80386 processor, up to 16MB(yes, MB!) of 60ns RAM, seven ISA expansion slots(perfect for your brand new, blazing fast 14.4kbps internal modem!). Zork never ran so smoothly!

I have many of these pics. I will not share them all. I WILL share a cool model of the factory they had on display, made entirely out of recycled motherboard parts:

I especially like the palm trees made out of cut up ribbon cable.

The tour was very, very cool. We couldn't take any pictures in the production area because they didn't want the workers distracted by the possible flashes and such. The top floor was an automated warehouse of sorts, where the pallets were whisked around by forklifts suspended from the ceiling to large rack structures that took up two floors. It looked very sci-fi. The motherboards start out as plain PCB boards, then go through a machine where it gets a special adhesive painted on for the chipsets. It's passed to another machine that places the chips at a very high speed, then to a "wave" solderer, which is a fountain of melted, lead-free solder that the board passes over, perfectly soldering all the contacts on the underside of the board (VERY cool!). After that, the other components are added manually, then soldered and tested thoroughly. All this was done over two floors. The final stage (on a different floor) was packaging and shipping, again all done mechanically with a very clever conveyor belt system. A very worthwhile and enjoyable tour!

Then, lunch.


It was not my fault.


I didn't choose it.


They made me eat it.

No, we traveled 6500 miles for THIS!

We were informed that we didn't have time to stop for lunch, as UMC pushed our time up an hour, so they ordered McDonalds for us. A LOT of McDonalds! The Taiwan burgers taste pretty similar to the burgers in Japan, but less black pepper. No pictures, sorry!

The afternoon tour stop was at UMC, maker of many computer chips, including the iPhone 4 processors and networking chips. There was an interesting presentation given on how they made chips, and they showed up real-time cams of the workers making the chips, but since everything is done in sealed environment conditions, they couldn't suit us all up in "rabbit suits" as they call them, so we couldn't go out and see the process, which was a shame, because it looked fascinating.

Instead, they took us over to see their fitness center. This sounds a bit silly, but a) it was like a very nice YMCA on steroids. Enormous, many rooms for classes, a lot of good equipment, ping pong and pool tables and a full 50m olympic-sized pool and b) in Taiwan, they do not have the gyms that we have. CYCU is a campus of over 12,000, and is comparable to UWM in many ways. Their rec center has exactly SIX treadmills. The center they had over at UMC was like having a fitness center complex of about a square mile in the States, so it really was a showpiece for them.

Back at about 6 and starving. Need to find a place to eat dinner!