Contract manufacturers find their idea of Heaven

BESIDE THE FLASHY Computex and CeBIT for showing off finished goods, there are also exhibitions for the contract manufacturers and their component and machinery makers, which attract far less attention but cover no less large business. No pretty showgirls and gigantic banners here - it is all calm and professional.

Singapore's Globaltronics, held every even year, is the leading gathering of that sort: the 2008 edition, held this past week from Tuesday till Friday, had 527 exhibitors from 28 countries meeting some 11,000 expected visitors in downtown Singapore. Most of the booths were populated by the vendors from Taiwan and mainland China, Japan, Germany, USA, the UK and of course Singapore itself.

For a manufacturer like Foxconn (US$ 40.5 billion worth of contracts in 2006), Flextronics (US$ 18 billion) or Asustek (US$ 17 billion), the machinery shown here gets the board-making job done. Everything from next-generation solder and bump materials (something Nvidia should look at maybe) to electron microscopes and inspection cameras is on show.

Some stuff you see here is way beyond the usual: the attractively named MV2-D1280-640 camera from Vital Vision delivers a whopping 488 fps - a nice lucky number to boot - at 1280x1024 native resolution and constant frame rate for, guess, assembly line product checks. Or, how about a board inspection machine that can handle up to 400,000 full server size mainboards per hour?

Interestingly, the mainland Chinese firms are reaching the technology parity with the West in PCB making: Onpress in Guangdong, for instance, offers up to 12 layers boards as well as 6 layer flexible PCBs. A 2 layer PCB here can be ultrathin at just 0.1 mm.

Finally, there are new players in the field - India, Vietnam and Thailand are the new locations for future volume component manufacturing, and, according to the organisers, there are more visitors than ever from these exotic places. Looking for a board plant near a Phuket beach or Bombay mall? Watch out, it might be there soon. µ