Dropped, cooked and drowned: inside the Toughbook factory

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Posted on 31 Oct 2008 at 11:17

Panasonic's Toughbooks, quite rightly, have a reputation for being, well, tough. But the drop heights and spill figures written on the laptops' specification sheets are a drop in the ocean compared to the punishment they go through in the factory. Computer Shopper visited Panasonic's Osaka factory to find out how Toughbooks are built and tested.

The only way to make sure that a laptop is built to the correct specifications to withstand the necessary levels of punishment is to build them from scratch, which is what Panasonic does at Osaka. From soldering chips onto blank circuit boards to assembling all of the components inside chassis, every stage of a Toughbook's creation is carried out by Panasonic using specialised machines built by the company.

The production line starts with the motherboard assembly. Along the automatic line they have BIOS chips and Intel chipsets soldered to them. Intel Core 2 Duo processors are automatically fitted, and they stream off rolls containing hundreds of chips. The finished motherboards are checked for errors by hand and passed onto the next stage of the assembly line, where they're assembled by hand with the other components - chassis, hard disk, screen, optical drive, and so on - into a completed laptop.

While building key components ensures that the laptops are built to the correct specifications, how can Panasonic be sure that the resulting products are tough enough? The answer is in the test lab, where an incredible set of tests are performed that would break your average laptop down into smouldering heap of broken plastic.

One of the most important tests is on the keyboards, where a machine automatically hammers away at the keys for days on end. This ensures that the keyboard will last to a lifetime's worth of use on the road. While this test may seem no more advanced that the machines Ikea has for testing its sofas, the next section in the lab has some incredible technology.

Perhaps the most impressive are the Thermal Shock chambers. Depending on the component and model of Toughbook being tested, these test chambers are capable of taking the temperature from -40⁰ C to 110⁰ C in one minute. That's extreme Arctic cold to more-than-boiling hot in less time than it takes to boil an egg. Even more impressive, these tests can last for five days. To make sure that it's not just dry heat, some of Thermal Shock temperatures can also create high-humidity environments.

A key use of Toughbooks is inside moving vehicles where vibrations can wreak havoc with ordinary laptops. To ensure Pansonic's computers don't succumb to the same problems, a vibration test tries to shake seven-levels of hell out of the laptops, with shake frequencies between 5 and 2,000MHz. If that doesn't sound quite enough, heat, humidity and vibrations can all be applied at the same time.

Next in line is the water resistance test. As you can probably guess by now, this is not just a simple thimble-full of water delicately spread over a laptop, but a full high-pressure 360⁰ spray. A laptop sits on a platform, while a ring that produces several jets of water spins around it. Again, the test can go on for days, just to make sure that the Toughbooks are really resistant.

The main image that people have of Toughbooks is that they can take a drop, as we've seen in our video test of the Toughbook CF-R6. The testing reflects this need with a drop-test that drops a laptop onto a hard surface 26 times at different angles.