I’ve been wondering this for years. Like, I look at a motherboard and think, okay, this motherboard connects all pieces together. But HOW?! Watching a video of machines solder small bits of metal onto a board doesn’t help me understand it.
How does each individual piece get made first? It all just looks like metal to me. If you were to make a motherboard from scratch, what would the process be?
In: Technology
A motherboard (or any circuit board) is a “printed circuit.” It’s a layer of non-conductive material (these days, usually glass fiber) covered in ultra-thin copper wires. These copper wires are placed in specific ways to connect different parts together. The whole assembly is then coated in resin and heat-treated to cure the resin. This protects the wires from oxygen, so that the copper won’t corrode.
Soldering means putting a tiny dot of melted metal on an actual “chip” (the real integrated circuits that do the *calculation*) to connect the chip to those wires on the motherboard. Without the solder, it’s possible the chip could disconnect, or just have a flaky connection that could cause serious faults or actual damage. With the solder, the chip is securely connected to the specific wires it needs to be connected to.
Different chips need different wiring, which is why (for example) you can’t plug an Intel processor into a motherboard designed to use an AMD socket. It’s not just that they wouldn’t fit right, it’s that all the connections are very different; one part might be a power source on one chip and just an ordinary data connection on the other. You’d probably damage (=burn out) part of the processor even if you *could* somehow connect it to the socket.
Just putting solder onto a completely blank circuit board, one with no internal copper wires, would be completely pointless. It wouldn’t do anything except hold the chip in place. You need the internal wires inside the printed circuit in order to get any benefit.
If you have a printed circuit board handy (doesn’t have to be a motherboard, it can be any type), get a magnifying glass and take a look at the “back” or “bottom” side of the board. You’ll see many, many tiny wires just below the surface, and all sorts of little pins. The wires are the ones I mentioned above, that connect the different parts together. The pins are soldered bits from the chips on the circuit board.
Latest Answers