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
TLDR the mother board is just a copper road map on a silicon sheet.
The motherboard isn’t just a flat sheet of silicon. it has copper lines running along the back side, some times covered by another layer of silicon sometimes not. where the lines end it has a (usually gold)contact point poke through the silicon to the front. this is part the chips are soldered to. the solder bonds the circuit to the board and the circuit uses Logic Gates to determine which contact point to send power to(which other chip/circuit). the motherboard doesn’t do anything on it’s own it could just be replaced by a crap-ton of wires but that would be a pain in the ass to setup/repair, and very very expensive. the motherboard can be printed with a some chemical help fairly cheaply. the pattern of the copper lines is much easier to repeat for mass production and create for developing a new board. because the copper lines are fixed into the silicon they are much less likely break than the chip on the boards so maintenance costs are down too.
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