Giant production lines established on vast areas where teams of Chinese youth work hard for over nine hours a day to manufacture and test OPPO’s smartphones. Daily News Egypt has recently conducted a tour in the company’s plant in China to learn more about the manufacturing and tests done by the company.
Quality Engineering Lab
This lab is specialized in regularly spot-checking the handsets from the beginning to mass production so as to manage and control the handset quality.
Lab tests can be divided into electrical performance tests, structural tests (destructive, structure-plug), environmental aging test (continuous aging of functional components, adaptability in various environments). The total number of tests is more than 150.
Quality Assurance tests highlights:
Micro drop test: The front and back areas of the handset are thrown from a 7cm height 20,000 times respectively, and the handset is also thrown from the other four sides. Each handset is thrown 42,000 times in total.
Button click test: As the Power and Volume keys are frequently used, they tap each side key 100,000 times with the 1kg force and tap the fingerprint key 1 million times. If consumers click buttons 50 times a day, it will take around 6 years to finish all the 100,000 clicks.
Drop test: The minimum height of the falling handset is 1.0m. The handset will fall from its six surfaces, eight corners, and 12 edges and fall from each surface, corner and edge twice. If the first drop test is successful, they will conduct the second drop test in the same way as the first one and raise the falling height to 1.5m.
Press test: This test simulates a scenario where the user may press the handset in use against a small object (such as a key) and verifies whether the handset is damaged.
Tumble test: Place the handset in it and randomly rotate the roller 75 times at a rotational speed of 3-5 times per minute (equivalent to tumbling from the 1m height 150 times). The four corners of the handset may be bruised to some degree, yet function failure shall not be allowed, and the ornament and shell shall not be detached or cracked. After the test, the handset will be disassembled to verify for signs of internal structural damage.
Rain test: Before conducting the rain test based on the IPX2 waterproofing grade (rainfall 60L/hour, known as moderate rain), they pitch the handset at a 75°angle to any of the four sides. After the test, they wipe the handset clean and verify whether all of the functions are normal. Then, they lay the handset aside for three days to ensure that the water inside the handset evaporates. Finally, they disassemble the handset to verify that the main board BTB and display screen are not corroded.
Salt spray test: They spray the moisture with the salt concentration of 5% onto the surface of the handset and store it in a hot and humid environment (55°C and 95%H). Later, they take the handset out and store it at normal temperature, making it exposed to air. Then, they conduct the complete inspection on the handset.
Environmental work: They place the phones into an extreme high-temp environment of 85℃ for 500 hours. After the test, the functions must be normal and the RF index parameters are within the specified range.
Sweat test: They will prepare artificial sweat, dip a piece of clean cloth in the artificial sweat and wrap the handset with the cloth. Then, they store the handset in a hot and humid environment (55°C and 95%H). 48 hours later, they take the handset out and verify it.
OPPO also tests the handset in various environments with daily necessaries such as drink, coffee, and floral water. The environments are closer to those where the handset is used.
SMT Centre:
Currently, there are 38 motherboard production lines and 25 small plate production lines. The production capacity of each month is 7.5 million motherboards and 25 million sub-boards. Besides, they also have 65 fully measuring and calibration.
After each machine, they have another machine to verify the products produced by the previous machine are qualified. In the mounting line, there are three automatic inspection procedure and one manual inspection procedure to guarantee the welding quality.
The production capacity of each test line is about 10,000 one day, which equals to 2.5 the production capacity of a manual test line.
Assembly Line Workshop of Factory M
The assembly line workshop for handsets is the place where particles of handsets are assembled to be finished products. Up to now, there are total 26 assembly lines in the assembly line workshop.
All the production lines in the assembly line workshop on the third floor are producing R11 and each production line can be divided into 2 segments: assembly segment and testing segment.
OPPO factory operates daily through one shift starting from 8:00 am till 11:00 pm, with two hours of break per day.
