Sapphire Technology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sapphire Technology (Chinese: 蓝宝科技) is a Hong Kong-based technology company, which produces graphics cards for personal computers and workstations, motherboards, TV tuner cards, and digital audio players.
Sapphire's products are based on ATI graphics processing units and motherboard chipset technology. The company is the largest supplier of ATI-based video cards in the world.[1][2]
Sapphire was the first company to release a video card with a high definition multimedia interface (HDMI) connector.[3]
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[edit] Manufacturing facilities
As of 2007, Sapphire has two ISO 9001 and ISO 14001-certified manufacturing facilities in Dongguan, China, which have a monthly production capacity of 1.8 million video cards.[2] The manufacturing facility[vague] had an area of about 250,000 m² used by 16 independent production lines as of May 2005.
[edit] Manufacturing process
Sapphire buys printed circuit boards (PCB), the basic part of a graphics card, from an external contractor. The next step in the process is placement of the surface mount device (SMD) components. This is performed by a fully automated placement machine. Soldering is performed using the reflow soldering method.[4] It then uses ATI's technology to place the memory and GPU required for the specific graphic card.
