Kingston Factory Tour in Shanghai
As promised in the welcome post, we’ve opened a veil of secrecy over the process of manufacturing RAM and USB flash drives. The post of revelations will be devoted to the Kingston factory, which is located in the city of Shanghai, China. This is one of the four major factories of Kingston. It was built in 2001 and is wholly owned by the company that built it. Kingston's construction costs amounted to about $ 65 million, at the end of 2012 the factory was estimated at $ 1.5 billion.
Under the cut - photos from the factory, a story about product testing and a couple of interesting facts.
The plant operates around the clock. 3 shifts of 8 hours. 18 production lines. A huge number of employees bring service buses to work, but there are also those who arrive on their electric scooters. For them, by the way, the parking with “charging” is equipped. Any citizen of China can get a job at the Kingston factory, there are no problems and restrictions. Lunch is provided to employees free of charge; in case of going to overtime, they feed twice.
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The plant is huge, the goods are very small, but the unique storage system of the goods allows you to quickly navigate and find the desired products in the shortest possible time. Before getting to the warehouse, products undergo very rigorous testing - in addition to the usual performance checks, all modules and flash drives are tested at critical temperatures - both during heating (memory modules warm up to 100 degrees) and during cooling (SSD is cooled to - 5 degrees). The duration of the test depends on the product class. Server SSDs can be tested for up to a week, and memory modules typically take 11 or 23 hours.
The design of memory modules is carried out by engineers of the company long before production. The design bureaus take into account every detail to the smallest detail - from a batch of specific memory chips to the height of the slats. Often it is known in advance that, for example, Hynix production chips selected for operation at 2,800 MHz will be used for gaming memory modules, so a printed circuit board is designed on this basis — more layers of PCB, higher quality wiring. At the same time, engineers use non-standard solutions related to the features specified by the customer: recently there was a lot of Kingston's low-profile DDR3 memory on the market. This was due to the popularity of compact systems and the need to make the height of the modules minimal. At the same time, neither the workmanship, nor the frequency characteristics, nor the timings suffered.
The production process is as follows:
First, the factory receives components: textolite, SMD elements, memory chips.
Each batch is checked at the entrance control.
After a visual check, the components are distributed in a storage warehouse, where more than 1000 pallets with materials can be stored simultaneously.
The production line is automated, everything is “done by itself”.
Chips are loaded into cars in such pallets
After the batch of finished products leaves the machine, it is checked first on visual inspection.
On such aggregates, SPD data is stitched into memory — in fact, it is at this moment that it becomes known how the memory will be determined in the system and at what frequency it will work by default.
Temperature testing, about which I wrote at the beginning, is carried out here in such cabinets.
But this is not enough, in order to be confident in the quality of Kingston. Not less than 10 percent of products undergo additional manual testing at the exit from the conveyor.
Final check before packing
Each device has a packaging standard, which is indicated on the stand opposite the workplaces.
And here are the palettes with finished products:
I hope after this improvised excursion you will know a little more about the high quality standards of Kingston and our approach to the production of any, even the smallest, USB flash drive. Stay with Kingston's blog at Geek Times and we will tell you even more interesting.
Under the cut - photos from the factory, a story about product testing and a couple of interesting facts.
Fact number 1
The plant operates around the clock. 3 shifts of 8 hours. 18 production lines. A huge number of employees bring service buses to work, but there are also those who arrive on their electric scooters. For them, by the way, the parking with “charging” is equipped. Any citizen of China can get a job at the Kingston factory, there are no problems and restrictions. Lunch is provided to employees free of charge; in case of going to overtime, they feed twice.
')
Fact number 2
The plant is huge, the goods are very small, but the unique storage system of the goods allows you to quickly navigate and find the desired products in the shortest possible time. Before getting to the warehouse, products undergo very rigorous testing - in addition to the usual performance checks, all modules and flash drives are tested at critical temperatures - both during heating (memory modules warm up to 100 degrees) and during cooling (SSD is cooled to - 5 degrees). The duration of the test depends on the product class. Server SSDs can be tested for up to a week, and memory modules typically take 11 or 23 hours.
Fact number 3
The design of memory modules is carried out by engineers of the company long before production. The design bureaus take into account every detail to the smallest detail - from a batch of specific memory chips to the height of the slats. Often it is known in advance that, for example, Hynix production chips selected for operation at 2,800 MHz will be used for gaming memory modules, so a printed circuit board is designed on this basis — more layers of PCB, higher quality wiring. At the same time, engineers use non-standard solutions related to the features specified by the customer: recently there was a lot of Kingston's low-profile DDR3 memory on the market. This was due to the popularity of compact systems and the need to make the height of the modules minimal. At the same time, neither the workmanship, nor the frequency characteristics, nor the timings suffered.
The production process is as follows:
First, the factory receives components: textolite, SMD elements, memory chips.
Each batch is checked at the entrance control.
After a visual check, the components are distributed in a storage warehouse, where more than 1000 pallets with materials can be stored simultaneously.
The production line is automated, everything is “done by itself”.
Chips are loaded into cars in such pallets
After the batch of finished products leaves the machine, it is checked first on visual inspection.
On such aggregates, SPD data is stitched into memory — in fact, it is at this moment that it becomes known how the memory will be determined in the system and at what frequency it will work by default.
Temperature testing, about which I wrote at the beginning, is carried out here in such cabinets.
But this is not enough, in order to be confident in the quality of Kingston. Not less than 10 percent of products undergo additional manual testing at the exit from the conveyor.
Final check before packing
Each device has a packaging standard, which is indicated on the stand opposite the workplaces.
And here are the palettes with finished products:
I hope after this improvised excursion you will know a little more about the high quality standards of Kingston and our approach to the production of any, even the smallest, USB flash drive. Stay with Kingston's blog at Geek Times and we will tell you even more interesting.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/376197/
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