Smartphones are amazing devices that have become indispensable in our daily lives, but have you ever wondered about the fascinating processes behind their making? India has become a global leader in phone manufacturing, with Xiaomi boasting that 99% of its phones are produced here. As the company unveils its most affordable phone in India – the Redmi A2 – we got a chance to visit one of its factories and witness what goes on at the assembly line. Nestled at the edge of the National Capital Region near Gurgaon, the factory lies in the industrial town of Bawal. As I got off the bus into the scorching heat, I was reminded how close we were to Rajasthan, the predominantly desert state. We were first taken to the factory’s SMT (Surface Mount Technology) plant where we were asked to put on factory overalls and shoe covers before we were gently frisked – a part of the routine hundreds of workers here follow daily. The SMT plant was quite large with endless lines of machines whirring and beeping as they processed hundreds of PCBs (printed circuit boards) every hour. For those unaware, Surface Mount Technology is the method used to mount electrical components directly onto a PCB. Workers' roles here looked simple – loading PCBs into the machine and ensuring that every unit was in order before being fed to the next machine. The heavy lifting, such as soldering and pasting the various components on the board, were handled by the machinery. Obviously, since the entire factory is an assembly plant rather than a proper manufacturing unit, most of the tiny components came wrapped in transparent packages and were not actually produced here. The job of the SMT plant was to simply assemble these. The next stop was the assembly plant, where finished components like cameras, motherboards, batteries, and displays were put together. In contrast to the SMT plant, where most of the processes were automated due to their intricacy and the size of the components, the assembly plant sees a far greater human input. On both sides of the worktops, workers aligned in rows and fitted the components in rhythmic coordination. They hardly spoke to each other, probably to keep productivity at the maximum. The workers wore red armbands that indicated their roles and the components they handled. Occasionally, a “Team Leader” armband would be seen patrolling the rows, ready to help the junior workers when needed. The camera assembly procedure captivated me the most. The camera module is a complex component of a mobile phone, with multiple lenses that cooperate to capture crisp images. To assemble it, a special enclosure is needed. The factory tour guide informed IndianExpress.com that the enclosure was designed to be dust-free. Humidifiers inside run continuously to keep dust “settled” so none gets into the lenses. Another process that was particularly fascinating to watch was the “ageing test.” Assembled phones were tested for six hours in a dedicated room to check their hardware performance. Hardware obviously includes speakers, and for that, every phone’s speaker unit is kept running continuously at max volume. You can imagine what scores of phones blasting audio at the same time in a closed space would sound like. The man in charge of the ageing test wore protective gear to preserve his hearing. I could barely last for 5 minutes in the room, the piercing noise was just too much to handle. Finally, we were led to perhaps the most exciting part of smartphone research – durability testing. I was surprised to see a whole room dedicated to this process, with a host of equipment designed to rigorously test the phone’s build before it’s given the green light for mass production. One machine here tumbled a Redmi A2 unit over and over again probably to emulate the phone rolling down a hill. As I boarded the bus to head home, I looked at my phone once and it immediately evoked in me a sense of all the processes that it may have undergone to finally land in my hands. The Redmi A2 launched in India starting at Rs 5,999 on May 19 and comes with a 2-year warranty.
