Kingston Factory Tour (Hsinchu, Taiwan)

Flash Assembly & Testing

Since the Hsinchu facility's manufacturing capabilities are split into 90% memory and 10% flash production, the Flash Assembly and Testing floor wasn't quite as bustling as the others, but we still got a good idea of what goes on behind the scenes when it comes to products like USB flash drives, solid state drives, and Secure Digital (SD) flash cards.


From what I recall, this is a very impressive and versatile machine, since it assembles, inspects, and labels up to 40,000 USB flash drives per day. Flash assembly is not all automatic and machine-based though, there were Kingston workers manually assembling Secure Digital (SD) flash cards. Needless to say that it's a very simple process, the employees take the PCBs with the flash memory on it and then sandwich them between the front and back plastic casings. Once the SD cards are assembled they are sealed shut with a proprietary infrared soldering method.


This floor was also dedicated towards flash QA testing, and that is where this apparatus comes into play. 24 SD cards are placed on the bottom half of this device, and then the top part is lowered until it touches the metal contact points on the SD cards. This allows Kingston to test all 24 units at once with whatever validation procedure they or a third-party company requires.


While solid state drives were also being tested prior to final assembly, we were told that the majority of SSD production now took place at Kingston's facility in Shanghai.