Corsair Factory Tour

On our recent visit to San Francisco for IDF, we took the opportunity to go and see the guys at Corsair Memory for a tour around their facility in Fremont, CA. We thought it might be interesting for you guys if we snapped the place that actually makes all the RAM that goes in your machines, and take you around a little tour of how your RAM modules come into being!



RAM starts out like this - as a sheet of blank PCBs with no surface-mounted components...yet!



This boring-looking machine takes those sheets and presses hot solder onto them in accordance with a template - almost like using a stencil!



The stencilling process in action.



These reels contain tiny little components on strips.



The machine they are attached to picks up a bunch of them and fires them onto the sheets of soldered PCBs. See the motion blur on the gun!



The PCBs then get sent through this oven to bake - the heat melts the solder onto the components, creating the finished module...



... which comes out the other end looking like this. Individual modules are trimmed from the PCB frame just like an Airfix kit...



... and into a tray full of lots and lots of RAM.