Solid-state drives: manufacturing at Kingston Technology

The manufacturing process

After this testing, the design hardware and software are put into mass production for assembly, testing and packaging. Kingston’s 59 manufacturing lines around the world can produce hundreds of millions of products a year. The production process features its own rigorous and multi-stage testing regimen to ensure quality.

• The first stage of this process, incoming quality control (IQC), happens while Kingston sources the raw materials necessary for the fabrication of its storage products from the world’s leading suppliers.
• The material kitting stage happens next. Necessary components are loaded on the line, ready for assembly.
• The most crucial stage of manufacturing occurs next: surface-mount technology (SMT). These lines are the beating heart of the Kingston manufacturing process and assemble thousands of products an hour. First comes the screen printer, spreading solder paste over a stencil of the approved SSD design that is transferred onto the circuit board.
• This goes through the AOI (automated optical inspection) station and, with this inspection complete, proceeds to surface mounting of passive components.
• The reflow oven then cures the solder paste to precise specifications, depending on the exact layout of the circuit board. All products undergo a final inspection after reflow.
• With surface mounting complete, the SSDs can proceed to labelling. Here they are put through an automatic labelling system that can individually label a thousand SSDs an hour. Labels tag the product part number and help identify genuine Kingston products, so it is an important stage in the production process.
• The next stage of the manufacturing process is depanelling. Often, products are put together on large sheets of circuit board, which are separated (or depanelled) into individual drives later.
• The SSDs are ready for testing. At Kingston, we take pride in our advanced testing process featuring 29 patents. Only products that pass every stage of this process leave the factory. In addition to two rounds of function testing, we conduct an MST test for stress testing. We screen every memory die on our flash products and have strict cutoffs/requirements for a number of permissible defects such as bad blocks.
• After this testing is complete, case assembly can go ahead for the 2.5” SSDs (M.2 SSDs do not require this stage).
• With the SSDs now fully assembled, a final round of labelling and QC testing is next. The products are checked for device info and general quality control, subjected to a visual inspection and a QA gate for a final function test.
• With every stage of testing complete, the SSDs are finally ready for distribution. Their next stop is packing, so they can be packaged, processed and shipped out. From here, they go on to retailers, etailers, distributors and customers worldwide.