Sapphire jewelry. They also may be created synthetically in laboratories for industrial or decorative purposes in large crystal boules. Because of the remarkable hardness of sapphires – 9 on the Mohs scale (the third hardest mineral, after diamond at 10 and moissanite at 9.5) – sapphires are also used in some non-ornamental applications, such as infrared optical components, high-durability windows, wristwatch crystals and movement bearings, and very thin electronic wafers, which are used as the insulating substrates of very special-purpose solid-state electronics (especially integrated circuits and GaN-based LEDs). Sapphire is the birthstone for September and the gem of the 45th anniversary.
Sapphire Technology the release of the Sapphire Atomic Edition HD 4890. 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. The manufacturing facility had an area of about 250,000 m used by 16 independent production lines as of May 2005. 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