Kingston Factory Tour in Fountain Valley, CA, USA

Testing

The testing process at Kingston is really different from what other manufacturers are doing. They have the two required steps, SPD chip programming plus quick test and then full functional test on a real-world environment. But these two steps are fully automated; we’ve never seen this before.

Kingston developed a machine for doing this. A mechanical arm gets a memory module, insert it in the SPD chip programmer, and after the SPD chips is programmed and a quick test is performed, the mechanical arm installs the module on a motherboard for a full functional testing.

SPD (Serial Presence Detect) is a small chip located on the memory module that holds working parameters for the memory module, like timings.

Figure 18: Kingston testers.

Figure 19: One of the testers.

Figure 20: Tray inside the machine containing the memory modules to be tested.

Figure 21: Mechanical arm getting modules to be tested.

The SPD programmer and quick tester is located on the center of the machine. As you can see, there are four memory sockets, so four modules can be tested at the same time. As you can see in Figure 22, failed modules are separated from the good modules.

Figure 22: SPD programmer and quick tester.

After the SPD programming and quick test, the modules are installed on real motherboards by the mechanical arm, as you can see in Figure 23. Below each steel cover there is a real motherboard. If you pay close attention, you can see a display controlling the temperature of each module.

Figure 23: Functional testing.