Go to Kingston.com Homepage ASIA  
Kingston Company


A Closer Look at Kingston Far East Manufacturing Facility

During Computex Taipei 2005, Mr. Wesley Fink of AnandTech was invited to take a closer look at the Kingston Taiwan manufacturing facility. Kingston Far East was pleased to arrange a plant tour for Mr. Fink during his stay in Taiwan.

We would like to thank Wesley Fink of AnandTech for the contribution to the article below.


The Kingston Taiwan manufacturing plant is about an hour southwest of Taipei, in the Science Park in Hsinchu, a city near Taiwan's west coast. Hsinchu is called the "Technology City," as it has facilities for many familiar names in the IT sector.


The Hsinchu manufacturing plant was opened in 1997 and this is also the location of Kingston's Far East Headquarters.

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 Hsinchu plant has 4 floors of SMT lines producing DDR, DDR2, and flash memory

Raw materials

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


Incoming raw materials, including PCBs 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 touch components again until the final Quality Assurance checks.


8-up DIMM blanks are 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 occurs 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


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 ensure that customers will always get the quality they expect from 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.

In addition to the process above, Kingston conducts complete 100% final testing on all DIMMs. Kingston is proud that it has pioneered many of the processes and QA procedures that are now in common use in the memory industry., Thanks to Kingston, 100% final testing is now commonly used in the memory market.

Kingston Far East is also a major manufacturer of flash memory of all types - SD and Compact Flash memory in particular.

Again, Kingston Far East is pleased to arrange this plant tour for Mr. Fink of AnandTech and thanks him for his contribution to the article above.

About Kingston:

Kingston Technology Company, Inc. is the world's largest independent manufacturer of memory products. Kingston operates manufacturing facilities in Fountain Valley, Calif., Taiwan, China, Malaysia, and including Payton Technology Corp., Kingston's back-end processing facility supporting memory packaging, test and logistics. With the advent of Payton, Kingston supports all memory processing functions from receipt of wafer to completed module. Kingston serves a network of distributors, OEMs, and retail customers in more than 70 countries and 3,000 locations worldwide. For more information on Kingston, please go to www.kingston.com/asia.

© 2008 Kingston Technology Corporation - All Rights Reserved