Headquartered in Fountain Valley, California, Kingston is by far the world's largest independent memory manufacturer. From its beginnings in 1987, Kingston has grown to a 27% market share in 2004 and almost $2.5 Billion in sales - which is more than 3 times larger than #2. Perhaps even more important was the 35% growth in revenue for Kingston from 2003 to 2004.

Kingston today manufactures memory at four manufacturing locations: US, Malaysia, China, and Taiwan. The four manufacturing plants have more than 35 Surface Mount Technology (SMT) lines for producing virtually every kind of memory available in the world. This includes the DIMMs, So-DIMMs, and flash memory that are of most interest in the Computer and Digital Imaging markets. Within these product categories, Kingston manufactures a full range of products, from OEM parts to their popular Value RAM series to Enthusiast-oriented Hyper X products.

Since we were in Taiwan for Computex, Kingston kindly invited AnandTech to take a closer look at their Taiwan manufacturing facility.

The Kingston Taiwan manufacturing plant is about an hour southwest of Taipei, in a huge technology park in Hsin-Chu, a city of about 350,000 near Taiwan's west coast. Hsin-Chu is the home to facilities for many familiar names in Computers and Technology.

The Hsin-Chu manufacturing plant was opened in 1997 and this is also the location of Kingston's Taiwan business offices.

Kingston Taiwan is a memory assembler, which means that finished memory chips are shipped to the plant where they assemble the memory using SMT technology. There are no wafer manufacturing capabilities in the Taiwan plant.

The Hsin-Chu plant has 4 floors of SMT lines producing DDR, DDR2, and flash memory during our plant visit.

Raw materials

Since Kingston Taiwan is a memory assembly plant, materials are made at other Kingston facilities, or purchased from outside manufacturers, and shipped to the Hsin-Chu plant for assembly.

Incoming raw materials - PCB's and memory chips - are received, segregated and tested for compliance with quality specifications prior to release to manufacturing.

When released by Quality Assurance, raw components are assembled on carts by job and moved to the manufacturing floor for assembly and testing.

This part of the Kingston design allows tremendous flexibility and quick turnaround of custom memory orders.

Complete Automation of Manufacturing

The Kingston plant is completely automated through the assembly process. Workers don't really touch components again until the final Quality Assurance checks.

8-up DIMM blanks were machine loaded.

Then high speed chip inserters behind glass load memory chips in the blank PCB.

The filled PCB then passes through SMT-soldering stations that secure the surface mount chips to the PCB.

Quality Assurance is in play at every step of the process. At this point, the soldered DIMMs pass through an optical inspection station.

Every board and chip is automatically examined for integrity of the soldering. Poor or suspect products get dropped from the line for further testing.

Separation, Testing, Labeling

Click image to enlarge.

Upon completion of the auto-inspection process, the DIMMs are labeled.

Here, you can see a DIMM in the labeling process.

This completely labeled DIMM is entering another machine stage that will separate the 8-up PCB into individual DIMMs.

The completed DIMMs are then loaded into trays and carted for a move to the Inspection line.

100% Final Quality Inspection

Even though the finished DIMMs have already been through machine inspections, Kingston continues the manufacturing process with 100% inspection.

The finished DIMMs are moved to the inspection area.

On these lines, every DIMM is tested in a motherboard much like the board where the DIMM will be mounted by the end-user.

This is a 100% Quality Assurance process - so every single DIMM is tested in a motherboard.

100% inspection requires huge amounts of manufacturing real estate, but Kingston believes that this level of inspection is necessary to assure that customers will always get what they buy with Kingston products.

Once inspection is complete, trayed DIMMs are carted and moved to final packaging.

The manufacturing process is completed with packaging similar to what you see here. This memory is destined for the Asian market.

Final Thoughts

Turning memory chips and PCBs into finished memory is fairly simple compared to motherboard or video card production. However, the processes are still very similar in modern manufacturing plants. There are just more raw parts to manipulate in the motherboard or video card manufacturing process, and more functions to verify in Quality Assurance.

The biggest surprise for us was the complete 100% final testing that Kingston uses for all DIMMs. We expected a statistical sampling method based on ongoing failure analysis to something like a Six Sigma confidence level. What we didn't expect was the 100% inspection Kingston assures us is a part of all their memory manufacturing. Kingston is very proud of the fact they have pioneered many of the processes and QA procedures that are now in common use in the memory industry, and it turns out that 100% final testing is a procedure commonly used by many of Kingston's competitors in the memory market.

Kingston Taiwan is also a major manufacturer of flash memory of all types - SD and Compact Flash memory in particular. While we were able to tour the interesting flash memory lines, Kingston asked that we not take pictures, since they consider some of their processes to still be trade secrets.

Some Kingston facilities also manufacture the wafers used for memory chips, which is the same basic process as CPU production. Memory chip production obviously adds a great deal of complexity to the manufacturing process, but whether Kingston does their own manufacturing or buys memory chips from others, the memory chip manufacturing is a prequel to the memory assembly that we saw in Taiwan.

Kingston today is truly a memory manufacturer known around the world. There are manufacturers well-known in Asia or the US or Europe, but Kingston is the only memory maker that we can confidently say is recognized in every corner of the globe.