ManicMobile

I love watching the Discovery channel and one of the things I watch is a show called “How it’s made”. Since this is a mobile phone blog, you also probably wonder , how cellphones are made. Most of the phones nowadays are made in China, or at least a lot are outsourced there. So what’s it like inside an actual mobile phone manufacturing facility?

Just like in the semiconductor facility, you’ll typically find people inside a mobile manufacturing facility all dressed up in a lab coat similar to mens medical uniforms like the one pictured below.

Unfortunately I can’t find a suitable photo and all I found on the net is this guy working on a hard disk, but you get the point. And for all you guys who think they’re avoiding some rare disease, nope, that’s not the reason for it. They’re not protecting the humans, they’re actually protecting the devices they’re manufacturing.

People can carry minute particles and contaminants. A single hair can ruin a batch of devices. Even as simple as human skin cells can be a contaminant.

A big part of the manufacturing process is done by a machine called pick and place like this photo below. What it does is it grabs some electronics components from a reel and carefully place them at the exact spot where it will be soldered. If it were people doing this, it would be very costly as it will involve a lot of manhours and people with tweezers to manually place those components on a board.

As much as mobile manufacturer like to use robots to do everything, there are some tasks that needs the dexterity of a human. Often time, towards the end of the process, you will see a bunch of factory workers all dressed up in scrubs like the ones available at http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/. Things such as final inspection and testing like powering up the unit, see if it works, probably insert a sim card (I’m not sure if that’s part of their Quality Assurance process though), all those things that might be too hard or too complex for a robot, those are just delegated to the factory workers.

Mobile phones are an important necessity in the modern society. In fact, even people with low level income have cell phones nowadays. Although not the latest models, but still, the technology has been embraced by all walks of life.