The Kingston California Factory Tour

The Kingston Tour

Kingston Headquarters is located on Newhope Street in Fountain Valley and it includes 5 large buildings – two on one side of the street and three on the other. It is where they began in 1987 in one building which demonstrates the owners keeping true to their roots although it would be much more profitable to relocate (outside California). Kingston is Fountain Valley’s largest or second largest employer. It is a brisk 5 minute walk from building A (below) to the factory buildings (above) across the street. We see Kingston’s logo – Rex, the read head – proudly displayed in front of two buildings.  We are heading into the building on the left.

We toured just one factory building and there is far more that we saw then we can show you. We are not able to bring you photos of their engineering, their development and general business centers. One thing that they are especially proud of – for a company that puts out a million pieces of HW a day – is that they run light. In fact, the Kingston RMA staff is tiny; less than a dozen people handle all the worldwide calls from the USA headquarters; we saw 4 techs on duty at noon on Wednesday taking calls – and not all of the phone lines were busy. And when the USA plant shuts down for the night, another call center opens up at another Kingston factory.

After a short visit to Kingston’s headquarters where we got our visitor’s badge, we walked across the street to meet PR Manager David Leong and Jonelle Faria from PR as well as Mark Tekunoff, Kingston’s Senior Technology Manager. We had met Mark before at an overclocking event in Las Vegas during CES 2010. We all put on white lab coats as we began the tour of their manufacturing factory. This facility is where they research, develop, fabricate, test, package, and ship Kingston’s DDR3, older RAM modules, flash drives and other related products such as SSDs.

The first section that this editor got to visit was on the second floor of the manufacturing factory. We were not allowed to take photos in this area which is where they house their technical support team and quality assurance labs for RAM, PCB design, and other engineers who create the Kingston product line. We also visited some of Kingston research and development labs where they pre-test their prototype modules for compatibility before sending the modules into production. Inside these labs, Kingston engineers test PC as well as Apple platform products.

They also proudly showed us their 4 three million dollar (each) super computers that are probably working on DDR4 (shh!) among many other products in development. Since there is no hardware for DDR4, for example – e.g. no production motherboards – everything must be simulated and even the specifications must be developed and agreed upon long before actual production of prototype modules probably begins in a year or two.

There are several main areas of the factory -the offices, the OEM and surface mount technology (SMT) product manufacturing and testing, and product storage and shipping. When Kingston receives their raw electronic components, they have to go through testing before they can go into production. Once it gets to the SMT line, there are rows of machines set up to produce DDR3 memory modules. Kingston does not use prebuilt memory modules; instead they begin with RAM PCB blanks where the memory chips, circuitry and other hardware parts will be installed. According to Kingston, they have the capacity to manufacture about 5 million memory modules, flash drives, SSD and related hardware pieces all across the world every week – that is an amazing potential to produce and ship 1 million units every business day!

Here is a flash drive PCB.

And here is where it all happens. Remember that this is one of Kingston’s smaller factories. This one has four production lines. The one in China is 5 times larger! We hope to visit that one for a future tour and ABT article.

There is a relatively small space for the offices downstairs – most of the process of actually making the product is done with robotic machines; humans oversee the process and do some of the actual RAM testing in motherboards and for several stages of Quality Control.

Incoming raw materials, including PCBs and memory chips, are received and tested for compliance with Kingston’s specifications before beginning the manufacturing process.

Here is a brief outline of how Kingston creates their RAM modules as we shall see detailed in photos that follow this description:

• Apply solder to the PCB followed by a robotic optical inspection.
• Using Surface Mount Technology (SMT) called pick and place, the small parts are inserted on the PCB and then inspected by machines.
• The modules go into an oven to solder the components to the PCB
• Visual inspection – some human, some robotic
• Depanelization
• Module testing
• Functional testing
• Heatsink attachment if applicable
• Labeling
• Packing
• Shipping

Now we can see the A-2 line – one of four – with many automated machines and we shall follow the RAM modules fabrication from start to finish.

Kingston uses a highly efficient straight line manufacturing process. It appears that the chip PCB blanks come into the Kingston manufacturing process with the data paths installed and lines pre-etched on the PCB’s but without the RAM chips. Of course, they are inspected and tested before they are used for manufacturing RAM modules.

Let’s go ahead and follow the machines along in their tasks as we start with the raw RAM chips and PCBs and end up with finished RAMs module which will be packaged and shipped to the end users.  Each one follows strict quality control and many testing steps along the way as you will see.

Here is one of the plates that Kingston uses to fabricate their DIMMs. A machine using a metallic stencil applies the solder paste to the memory modules.

The manufacturing process has to continue though and go through many inspections before it gets to the test-bench where they can go through further stress tests that each memory module has to pass. Just like before, we see machines working in 4 long rows producing RAM that we use in our PCs. The first machine applies the solder. The PCBs move from one machine to another on rails without any human intervention.

Below we are looking at the A-2 line’s first four machines. No, the line above isn’t moving that fast; some of these shots were rushed and the camera was moving; our apologies.

The first machine (above) is applying solder paste on a panel while the second one is an automatic inspection station. The light above each station alerts the technicians as to the machine’s status. These are very specialized machines that were either purchased and adapted or designed in-house by Kingston engineers who hold many patents in their field.

The third machine – “Pick and Place” – inserts the small components directly onto the PCB in precisely the right location one after the other in an incredibly fast sequence that is hard to follow with your eyes. It is also not very quiet as it goes about its tasks. The next picture shows the machine inserting one part after another.

Inside the Pick and Place, what looks like a Gatling gun is the head that spins to install the small parts such as transistors, resistors and integrated circuits. Each PCB takes about a minute from start to finish and then a module comes out the machine – one after another – and down the assembly line as they are automatically fed into the next machine.

The chips move on to the next process before going into the oven to bake the solder. Kingston uses a cold soldering process where the solder is installed on the PCB before to coming into the manufacturing section. Inside the oven, the chips are heated and the solder melts and makes the connections. As the PCBs leave the oven and move down the line another robotic machine places RAM chips on the PCB.

This is the second Pick and Place machine and it is perhaps taken from not such a good angle, but as the tour guides point out, it is wise to keep your hands away from the moving parts. Here it is placing the DRAMs on the PCB.

The set of soldering, inspection, insertion machines, plus the oven and the cutting machine makes up what is called a line. There are four of them in this factory; we are photographing line A-2. And this is one of the smaller factories when compared to the Kingston factory in Shanghai which has many times the manufacturing capacity of the Fountain Valley plant.

After passing robotic inspection, the panels move to a machine to be cut. The memory modules that until now were stuck together are separated by the depanelization machine and the excess is trimmed off.

After depanelization, the modules go though another machine inspection. Finally, the modules move to a tray that now has to go through human inspection. If they pass inspection, then the modules can then go to another stage where they will be stress tested for stability; server modules go through additional heat stress testing. Every single Kingston module is fully tested and passes many stages of human and robotic quality control prior to leaving their factories. This is one of the reasons for their incredible success – obsession with product quality and testing.

The above is called Functional testing. Each RAM module is actually tested in a motherboard before you get it! After testing, each module is sent for packaging, labeling, and shipping.

Kingston has several burn-in chambers for testing their server modules. They have calculated that a 24 hour test at extreme temperatures simulates – without any damage – the first three months of their RAM’s life – the most likely time it will fail, if it is going to fail at all.

Here are thousands of flash drives ready to be packed and shipped.

After the memory modules pass all of the testing stages, they have their heatsinks attached (if the module has one), packed and shipped to Kingston customers. We are now in the shipping department and our incredible journey following the RAM modules from raw PCBs and components to final product has been amazing. Let’s head for lunch, it is just after noon.

«1. Introduction2. The Factory tour3. Lunch & Conclusion4. View All»