A Tour Of The Kingston Memory Factory In Taiwan

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Have you ever wondered how memory modules are made? Kingston invited us to its factory in Taiwan, a small detour from our Computex coverage. The company gave us a look around at how its memory modules and USB drives are manufactured.

1

Visitors have to wear a special anti-static suit with with this printed on it. We also had to wear blue booties over our shoes.

2

The logo in the main lobby.

3

A display case of Kingston's achievements.

4

Where the DRAM magic happens.

5

It's very clinical.

6

That's your DRAM being put on the PCB.

7

A memory module is born.

8

RAM being passed between machines.

9

There it goes!

10

RAM getting split up from big sheets of PCB.

11

There it goes again!

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Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
28 Comments Comment from the forums
  • xaira
    the computer that tells the machines what to do in my fav memory factory is running windows, coincidence, i think not, score 2 for windows: )
    Reply
  • sliem
    Lol @ pic15 "It's break time!"
    should say "I'm sooooooooo tired, zzzzzzzz"
    or "Why did I buy an iPad? Whyyyyyyyyyy /cry"
    Reply
  • duk3
    Cool pictures.
    Could you please just put 10-15 of them on one page so I don't have to click through 44 pages?
    Reply
  • well duh, more pages means more ads showing, which is good for Tom.
    Reply
  • Trueno07
    Picture 17 is incredible.
    Reply
  • requiemsallure
    pic 21 seems like the fail rate is kinda high, i wonder if they reuse the chips that fail somehow, like in cpu's and gpu's
    Reply
  • Haserath
    Picture 24: Is it a good thing or a bad thing that that is empty? :)
    Reply
  • This has to be one of the least informative collections of pictures I have ever seen. After clicking through I still have no idea what the manufacturing process is (would it have made sense to present it from beginning to end?) All I have learned is that there is production (apparently the machines give birth to memory modules), testing (apparently the modules are put in test machines. But what sort of test is run?). And then there is packaging. Fascinating. Please tell me that Kingston forced you to scramble to pictures into a disorganised jumble and make random useless comments for the captions, without actually showing anything interesting.
    Reply
  • cembung
    need videos!
    Reply
  • enzo matrix
    duk3Cool pictures.Could you please just put 10-15 of them on one page so I don't have to click through 44 pages?Indeed. Once I realize an article is a picture slideshow on toms, I don't even bother reading it. Guess I missed out this time too.
    Reply